(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — AFCOM (www.afcom.com), a leading association for data center professionals, released a survey last month that shows that nearly two-thirds of large data centers operators will maintain or increase their budgets in 2009, despite the current economic downturn.
The remaining one-third of these data centers will cut their budgets by about 15 percent.
About 53 percent of the cuts will involve staff travel and training expenses, 38 percent will entail IT and support equipment purchases, including servers, switches, power and cooling and other hardware, and 14 percent will relate to staff layoffs, reports AFCOM.
The survey was initially done in May, drawing 300 responses from managers of large data centers.
The organization decided to do a follow-up survey in response to the recession, and conducted another survey in late November that prompted 133 responses.
The research also found that 86 percent of data center managers surveyed think that the increased use of virtualization will lower the need for new physical servers in 2009.
About 13 percent of respondents believe they had planned to increase or add software-as-a-service as an alternative to internally hosted application.
Nearly 7 percent said they plan to increase their use of video conferencing in 2009 to keep travel costs to a minimum. Cloud computing also seemed to be crucial to data center managers’ strategy with 23 percent saying that they planned to use cloud computing.
For those who did not plan on using cloud computing, 49 percent of data center managers said it wasn’t applicable to their strategy, while 16 percent were concerned about security, 11 percent questioned the reliability of providers and an equal percentage cited cost issues.
Finally, some 13 percent of respondents said they were not fully confident about cloud service providers in general.
Foreshadowing the results of the AFCOM survey, in May 2008, Digital Realty Trust released the findings of its own commissioned survey which revealed that the vast majority of the senior decision makers at US corporations plan to expand their data center facilities in the coming year.
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