IRELAND AND Russia have scored at the bottom of an independent survey that measures how effectively and efficiently large organisations utilise their data centres.
The second Next Generation Data Centre Index, compiled for Oracle from interviews with 949 company managers across countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), gives Ireland an overall score of 4.72, where 10 would be the most sophisticated data centre strategy possible. The index average score was 5.58.
Ireland, which along with Russia was included in the index for the first time this year, came behind most countries when corporate data centres were evaluated in terms of “green” sustainability issues as well as IT and business utilisation.
“I was surprised we were behind the average, because we do have quite a number of data centres in Ireland,” said John Caulfield, solutions director, Oracle Ireland.
“There has been quite a lot of growth in the area. Perhaps with the focus on getting data centres up and running, there’s been less focus on actual operations.”
In Ireland, 50 company managers were interviewed in large companies – termed those with over $100 million (€78 million) in annual revenue – across business areas including the public sector, telecommunications, utilities, media, and retail.
Ireland fell short in areas such as managing server performance, with 38 per cent of managers stating they wait until they get user complaints before adjusting server workloads. The survey average was only 16 per cent for this “wait and see” approach.
Half of Irish organisations utilised only 20 per cent of server capacity, compared to a 30 per cent average in the overall index.
And only 14 per cent of Irish respondents said they viewed the utility bill for their data centre, compared to a 52.2 per cent average.
Overall, the survey indicates that many businesses have been caught off guard by the fast growth in “Big Data” – the explosion in data flowing into businesses from the web, mobile devices, sensors, internal corporate data capture, and other sources.
As a result, the index shows businesses are finding they need to outsource data centre and cloud services.
Compared to the first index, compiled last February, the proportion of respondents with in-house-only data centres dropped from 60 per cent to 44 per cent, while the proportion who said they are using some external data centres rose from 40 per cent to 56 per cent.
Up from 27 per cent last year, 38 per cent of respondents said they saw a need for a new data centre facility within two years.
Only 8 per cent said they would not need a data centre facility in the foreseeable future, compared to 17 per cent a year ago.
The Nordic countries scored highest on sustainability, followed by the Benelux region.
But 36 per cent of data centre managers overall revealed they never view their centre’s energy bills, and 39 per cent admitted they second-guess future workload requirements.
Overall, scores increased across the board over the first survey last year, said Caulfield.
Research for the index was independently conducted by Quocirca.
