Intel, Dell Study Finds Data Center Expansion Eats Up the Bulk of IT Teams’ Work

Data center expansion and migrating to the cloud takes up the majority of IT managers’ work, according to a study commissioned by Intel and Dell.Interestingly, more respondents (55 percent) said data center expansion requires the majority of their efforts compared to migrating to external clouds (42 percent). Jeff Klaus, GM of global data center management solutions at Intel, admits these numbers are a little surprising.“The wave of public cloud migration has been occurring over the past couple of years, and maybe we are starting to see the pendulum swing back a little bit toward private cloud,” he said. “That’s the only way I can explain it.”But, he added, while we typically think of data center expansion in terms of adding server nodes, IT managers could also include other elements like upgrading to 10 Gigabit Ethernet, for example. “It could be some upgrades to the system that might not necessarily mean you are expanding private environments but still take a lot of IT’s time,” Klaus said. “Maybe IT modernization might be a better way to explain it.” Morar Consulting carried out the study, surveying 311 IT directors and managers, IT system administrators, and applications architects in the U.S. and U.K. Its findings show the need for more granular insight into data center power consumption. And it concludes that IT teams are looking to new technologies and methods like artificial intelligence (AI) and DevOps to meet their data center demands.Eighty-seven percent of respondents said their organizations had experienced power issues. And 40 percent said improving power delivery efficiency is their top goal for managing data center power consumption. For comparison, 35 percent said improving power usage monitoring and 34 percent said improving the ability to anticipate server workloads were their top goals.