Environmental pressure to boost use of methodologies like ITIL
Almost half of organisations lack basic management information and processes to ensure efficient running of their datacentres according to a survey by Aperture Research Institute.
The research revealed 49% of those surveyed o are not able to track
physical changes in their datacentre including space, power and
cooling.
Datacentre managers admitted to using between three to five
different systems to store configuration information, making it
difficult to aggregate information onto a single view. Only 6% of
datacentre managers surveyed use a single system to document
everything.
Aperture Research Institute,
which specialises in datacentre research, said one reason for this lack
of basic management information was the slow implementation of
Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).
"ITIL grabbed a lot of traction within IT groups, but it stopped at
the server," said Steven Yellen, vice president of product and market
strategies at Aperture Research Technologies.
Yellen said just 29% of organisations were implementing ITIL, in the datacentre.
Datacentres confess to poor configuration management with less than a third implementing ITIL, Yellen said.
He pointed to an organisational divide between the IT department and
the datacentre manager, with potentially damaging consequences.
“At a time when high-density equipment is becoming widespread, the
availability of power and cooling information in the datacentre
dictates its absolute limits on capacity. Without reliable
configuration information, datacentres are increasing the risk of power
outages and bad capacity planning," said Yellen.
“The disparity between IT and datacentre facilities in implementing
good ITIL practices has created a situation where high density
equipment is to being managed to appropriate standards. If this
continues the number of disruptions in service will increase and costs
will continue to rise.”
Yellen added that the pressure to reduce the environmental impact of
the datacentre is going to encourage datacentre managers to look at
ITIL.
"The move to a green datacentre is going to force people to bring that
on. Power usage is just as important as storage. The push to go green,
whether it be decommissioning old equipment to analysing power
consumption, will push organisations to have an added level of detail
around change management processes, and look more closely at ITIL."
Aperture Research Institute, a spin-off of Aperture Technologies,
looked at 100 datacentre organisations across a range of industries
including banking, government, insurance, healthcare, data services,
retail and telecommunications.
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