41.5% Said Only 0-20% of SAN Migrations Completed on Time and Budget

Paving the path to the next generation data center through people, process and technology, SANpulse Technologies, Inc. announced the findings of a new IT survey. The results of the study, conducted across more than 100 large enterprises, provides insight into the priorities data center managers have over the next twelve months as well as the concerns surrounding the most common and difficult tasks they will face in 2011.

The SANpulse inquiry asked data center managers and decision makers at large organizations to rank data center priorities, based on importance. It also asked individuals to rank which projects on their 2011 IT roadmap are expected to be the most challenging and difficult to deal with. Key findings from respondents included the following:

• 51% of respondents indicated that technology refreshes were the top priority for 2011, highlighting that mean time to migrate (MTTM) was critical for rapid adoption of new technologies and fast execution of these operations. This was followed by data center consolidation, which 41.5% of respondents indicated was a top concern. 34.5% of respondents indicated the intent to migrate to a public or private cloud; 32.7% expect to transition to a virtualized Storage Area Network (SAN); 26.5% said that SAN optimization or re-tiering was a priority and 21% cited diversification of storage hardware as a top priority.
• When asked about the most difficult issues they expect to deal with, 39% responded that multi-departmental coordination was a top concern. 35% said that server remediation, SAN configuration errors, asset discovery and multi-departmental coordination were all challenging issues.
• On the topic of SAN migrations and whether or not these activities were completed in a timely manner and met budgetary requirements, 41.5% of the respondents said that only 0-20% of their migrations were completed on time and on budget. 62% said that 40% or fewer migrations completed on time and within budget. Finally, 79% have had less than 60% of their migrations meet their budgetary/time requirements.

"These results echo what is routinely heard from IT professionals who face these recurring challenges," said Greg Schulz, founder of the Server and StorageIO Group. "There is no such thing as a data or information recession, This means that as IT budgets for some expand, those organizations also need to do more with what they have including support growth and technology refreshes in 2011."

Schulz also said: "IT organizations focus much of their staff as well as wall or calendar time on data migrations to support technology refresh and upgrades along with consolidation initiatives. With the complexities associated with large scale migration or technology updates not to mention multi-departmental workflow coordination, IT organizations stand to recover these resources by reducing their mean time to migrate (MTTM). Many large IT organizations have already implemented phased refresh schedules where each year a portion of their technology gets refreshed. However budgets or spending remain constrained." Schulz added, "Organizations need to find creative and innovate ways to maximize their IT investments which includes reducing their MTTM, the result of which is to boost their effectiveness by stretching both staff as well as resources (server and storage hardware/software) further."

"The survey confirms our customers’ experiences. Data center consolidation and technology refreshes continue to be what are keeping administrators up at night," said Joy Burd, vice president of marketing communication for SANpulse Technologies, Inc. "Organizations rely on new technologies and consolidation to remain efficient and competitive – which can be a challenge when called on to do more with the same or less budget. SANpulse streamlines these operations to significantly reduce time requirements while reducing the cost, complexity and risk of traditional manual means."

SANpulse solutions mitigate the risk of navigating complex data center infrastructures through actionable insight and automation by leveraging the company’s modular proprietary software – SANlogics. SANpulse’s adaptive technology supports organizations in meeting new technology and business requirements through discovery, analytics and auto-generation of executables that simplify data center migration, consolidation and technology refresh initiatives.

SANlogics is a technology that Global 2000 enterprises around the world trust to support storage migration to deploy new technology in the data center. The software platform provides a dynamic solution that replaces labor-intensive and error-prone SAN migration methods in use by most organizations today. Powered by an adaptable, business-aware intelligence engine, SANlogics delivers analytic reporting and automation technology that adjust to constantly evolving SAN infrastructures and enables on-time and on-budget migrations and consolidations. SANlogics empowers organizations by consolidating internal knowledge and best practices into a versatile framework that includes data collection and correlation, intelligence generation, and actionable output.

About the 2011 Enterprise Data Center Survey
The 2011 Enterprise Data Center Survey was conducted in December, 2010 and included more than 100 large enterprises across a range of industries.

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