93% of European Businesses Acknowledge Criticality of Optimizing Application Performance

LSI Corporation announced the results of an exclusive survey of 412 European data centre managers designed to assess the performance challenges they face in their daily data centre activities.

Significant in the findings was that while 93% of the businesses surveyed acknowledge the criticality of optimising application performance across their data centres and networks, three-quarters of them do not feel they are achieving required performance levels.

In the survey, data centre managers reported that the key inhibitors to adequate application performance are network and storage access bottlenecks.

These limits are in many instances the result of massive data traffic increases challenging infrastructures, limited by slower growing budgets; what LSI calls the Data Deluge Gap.

This gap is caused by network traffic and storage capacity needs growing more than 30% per year while IT budgets and spending are growing at much slower rates of only 5 to 7%. As a result, data growth is outstripping the infrastructure build-out required to support it, and data centre managers are acutely feeling this challenge.

Highlights from the survey findings:

• 25% of data centre managers report that sub-optimal application performance leads to lost revenue.
• Two in five data centre managers worry about the impact of application performance on company competitiveness.
• Flash-based storage is of strong interest, but budget in this area is still low.
• 70% of data centre managers say network and storage access challenges cause their biggest performance issues, with transaction performance issues leading to lost business.

Data centre managers showed strong interest in flash-based storage and understand that solid state disks (SSDs) can accelerate application performance. However, the survey revealed that nearly half don’t yet have budget allocated to the purchase of SSDs and that perceived costs were cited as the biggest reason for many data centre managers holding back on their adoption of SSDs (92%).

Data centre managers report that the top four business-critical applications are virtualisation tools, Exchange, SQL Server and Oracle Applications.

"The survey reaffirms the need for strong performance improvements in data centres specifically around system intelligence and application acceleration given the growing challenges of the Data Deluge," said Tony Afshary, director of marketing, Accelerated Solutions Division, LSI. "There is a strong return on investment possible through the addition of intelligent silicon and flash-based storage in the datacentre and the survey shows a need for further collaboration between companies like ours and the data centre managers to fully understand and maximise these benefits."