Datacentres fail to give optimal performance

Businesses do not feel they are getting optimal performance levels from their datacentres, research has revealed.

In a survey of 412 European datacentre managers, LSI Corporation found that while 93 percent acknowledged the importance of optimising application performance across their datacentres and networks, three-quarters of them did not feel were achieving required performance levels.

They said the main problems were network and storage access bottlenecks, which in many cases were the result of massive data traffic increases. Describing this as the Data Deluge Gap, LSI said this was caused by network traffic and storage capacity needs growing more than 30 percent  per year, despite IT budgets and spending growing at much slower rates of only five to seven percent.

Of those surveyed 25 percent reported that sub-optimal application performance lead to lost revenue, while two in five datacentre managers said they worried about the impact of application performance on company competitiveness.

A resounding 70 percent of datacentre managers said their network and storage access challenges cause their biggest performance issues, with transaction performance issues leading to lost business.

However, when it comes to buying the tools, the money isn’t there. Despite showing a strong interest in flash-based storage and understanding that solid state disks (SSDs) could accelerate application performance, the survey found that nearly half of those surveyed don’t yet have budget allocated to the purchase of SSDs.

The perceived costs were cited as the biggest reason for many datacentre managers holding back on their adoption of SSDs, with 92 percent of those asked pointing the finger at this.

Tony Afshary, director of marketing, Accelerated Solutions Division, LSI, said: “The survey reaffirms the need for strong performance improvements in datacentres specifically around system intelligence and application acceleration given the growing challenges of the Data Deluge.

“There is a strong return on investment possible through the addition of intelligent silicon and flash-based storage in the datacenter, and the survey shows a need for further collaboration between companies like ours and the datacentre managers to fully understand and maximise these benefits.”