Between June and September of 2009, SearchDataCenter.com conducted the Data Center Decisions 2009 Purchasing Intentions Survey. Subscribers were contacted by email and invited to participate. For this 2009 survey, they had a total of 920 respondents, identifying themselves as IT managers, IT administrators, data center facility managers and IT executives. Respondents were primarily U.S.-based (43%), but the survey also included participants from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. More than half of respondents’ organizations employ more than 1,000 workers, and more than 25% of the companies have more than 10,000 employees.
Compared with last summer, data center budget growth screeched to a halt this year. In 2008, 30% of IT shops said they were increasing budget 5% to 10%, and 26% said they planned to increase budget more than 10%. Less than 15% of respondents were decreasing budget at all.
This year, most respondents said their budgets were flat, and 31% are decreasing spending. In fact, 14% are cutting budgets by more than 10%. SearchDataCenter.com advisory board member Robert Rosen, the CIO of the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, wasn’t surprised by the results.
“IT budgets lag [behind the overall economy] a little bit since they tend to commit to things that have to finish,” Rosen said. “It’s the new project starts that get canceled; hence the budget decrease now.”
Key salient points:
- IT shops buying server hardware to enhance virtualization deployments.
- Reduction in spend on Blades, likely due to insufficient cooling capacity to support rack of Blades.
- Windows Server 2008 installations grew from 23% to 45%, and decline in consideration for Linux.
- 85% of respondents said they’re sticking to Sun hardware, while 81% said they’re not discarding Solaris.
- Data Center power consumption is getting more important.
- Server virtualization spending continues, but at a sober rate.
- Systems management spending slumps.
- Interest in ITIL seems to have waned.
- IT job advancement situation grim.
For more details on the result of this survey, go here.
Tags: Consolidation, Data Center, Density, Emerging trends, ITIL, Service Management, services, Virtualization