Symantec released its 2010 State of the Data Center study this week. The study conducted by Applied Research found that midsize enterprises of 2,000 to 9,999 employees are more likely to adopt technologies such as cloud computing, deduplication, replication, storage virtualization and continuous data protection than either small or large enterprise size businesses.

The study with 1,780 respondents showed that midsize enterprises also place a higher importance on staffing and training and are more likely to make changes to their data centers and add new applications.

Respondents listed their data center initiatives in order: security (83%), backup and recovery (79%), continuous data protection (76%), server virtualization and storage resource management. These initiatives were followed by data archiving, energy savings, server consolidation, replication of backup data and storage virtualization.

As for disaster recovery, 80% had confidence in their plan. One-third said they have a plan that is undocumented or needs work. Forty-one percent said that cloud computing was not covered in their existing disaster recovery plan, over one-fourth of the respondents said that remote office operations were not included and 23% said that they had ignored virtual servers in their disaster recovery plan. One-third of the respondents have not re-evaluated their disaster recovery plan in the last 12 months. Not a good record as far as disaster recovery goes.

The median for the respondents was six data centers. Over half of the respondents said that reducing costs was their primary objective for 2010, followed by improving responsiveness and improving service levels.

There’s a lot of important information in the rest of the report. Stay tuned for the next article to find out.

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Engine Networks uses VMware for its virtualization offerings and we thought it would be useful to share some stats on how much consolidation we see in the ‘real world’.

Bear in mind that our sales consultants and engineers tailor solutions primarily for web facing, intensive transactional web systems many with high traffic and peaking around events so what we see is quite different from what might be expected in a more ‘normal’ IT situation (if such a thing exists). We also deal with multiple environments for customers – live/production, pre-production/QA and test – each of which has a different profile.

We manage several hundred VMs today and the average consolidation varies enormously environment to environment. In test environments we see perhaps what you would expect, around 20 VMs per ESX. In pre-production/QA environments we are seeing 8 to 15 VMs per ESX and in live/production environments, the average drops to 5-12 VMs per ESX. This is because most customers see the high availability features of VM as most important in production environments, rather than straight cost savings (although 1:3 or 1:5 is already quite a good saving!). In these cases, a host must be able, at any moment, to handle all the Virtual Machines from another host that is experiencing failure.

Quite a range of results, isn’t it? It shows, to us at least, the need for specialist consultancy and experience to get the best out of your infrastructure. See here for more info.

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A traditional computing environment includes physical bondage to all the pieces and parts that make up your computing environment, not to mention the daily management and maintenance of your systems, upgrades, patches, etc.

Engine Networks offers the same freedom from the daily management and maintenance of servers most managed hosting providers offer, but Engine Networks is more than just managed hosting. Imagine computing hardware, application platforms, security, industry-specific compliance solutions and inherent redundancy all as accessible, reliable and adjustable as the gas or electricity that heats your home. Simply turn the thermostat up and down to make your home environment more comfortable. With Engine Networks, you can order more power – capacity, redundancy, bandwidth, compliance – on demand. Functionality aside, Engine Networks also offers services other providers can’t deliver: hosted IT environments that are pre-configured and easily customized for fast rollout, and complete, holistic transparency into your system performance.

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Website traffic fluctuates. Time of day, seasonality, promotions, popularity, and flash crowds can all drive peak volumes. While you can anticipate and plan for some of this volume, few of us guess right all the time.

To complicate matters, your visitors expect steady, fast performance regardless of the traffic your site receives. Building your own infrastructure to handle peak traffic requires capital investment and facilities space – and no matter how big you build it, it still may not be enough. Having to choose between overspending or under-provisioning is a classic dilemma.

But by deploying your web application in the cloud, you can avoid this dilemma. You can eliminate the upfront fixed investment, and still gain access to compute resources to meet peak loads with on demand scalability, while still paying only for the compute time you actually use.

With Engine Networks vCloud, you can deploy your entire web application infrastructure in the cloud – whether you’re developing an entirely new service or enhancing an existing one. Your developers can provision multiple production-scale systems on demand in the cloud – saving time and expense over traditional testing scenarios and enabling faster handoff from development to operations. And if you’re starting a new line of business, you can launch on the web with a robust, state-of-the-art infrastructure without tying up limited capital.

More infos are available here.

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