Data centre index shows widespread improvements

Organisations across the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) regions are rapidly developing their data centre capabilities with improvements across several metrics, including sustainability, virtualisation, server utilisation and IT alignment.

This was among the findings of the latest Next Generation Data Centre Index report from Oracle. Cycle II of the report was release last week at the company’s Linlithgow centre, with Cycle I released in May of 2011.

Cycle I established that many businesses were lagging behind in their use of innovative technologies in their data centres, making them less able to meet industry demands and respond quickly to change. Many were also found lagging in terms of managing data centre costs.

Even in the short time between the two cycles, each of the metrics major topics have shown improvement, said Luc Opdebeeck, senior vice president EMEA hardware strategy, business development and sales, Oracle.

The report uses a quote from Tim Berners Lee that states "Data is the new raw material for the 21^st century." Opdebeeck expanded on this by saying "the way that a company handles its data could have bearing on how it is valued in the market."

The overall index score for Cycle I was 5.22, rising to 5.58 in Cycle II. The score is based on the performance measurement in a number of areas such as sustainability, virtualisation, consolidation, server utilisation, IT planning, upgrade management and IT/business alignment.

Despite the improvement overall, there was still cause for concern. Under data centre usage, comparison of the two cycles shows that while there has been a significant increase in the use of external data centres, rising from below 40% to above 50%, only around 35% of respondents said that they would need a new data centre within the next two years, prompting the report to ask if the Big Data boom had caught businesses off guard.

The survey was conducted among in EMEA across ten regions among 949 senior IT personnel among large (>$100 million revenue) and very large organisations (>$1 billion revenue). Ireland was included for the first time, with an overall index score of 4.79, compared to 5.58 as the average, ranking ninth out of 10 countries listed, ahead of Russia (4.62). The Nordic countries led the field with an average score of 6.51. John Caulfield, solutions director, Oracle Ireland, said that there were a number of areas where Ireland performed poorly, though he added that as it was the first time Ireland was included, there was not a lot to compare it to last year.

For the full story with details on the Irish performance, see the February edition of ComputerScope, available 9 February.