Here's a little report that sneaked out in November 2009 from AFCOM. It shows the results of polling over 400 AFCOM member Data Center sites in eight key categories.The eight areas of interest in the report are:

1) Greening
2) Data Center Consolidation
3) Emerging Technologies
4) Performance Monitoring
5) Current and Future Mainframe Usage
6) Data Center Facilities: Growth/Expansion/Relocation
7) Changing Storage Requirements
8) Cyber Terrorism

It's only nine pages, so no need to plough through page upon page of 'interesting' data - it just presents a great summary of things that would be of interest to anyone in the Server Management business.

What I found to be of particular interest is the 'Greening' section. It seems everyone wants to Green their data center but as the report shows, only 42% have an actual project in place to achieve this. The most common reason for this is lack of money. In these prudent times it’s not surprising that purse strings are being closely guarded, so the lack of funding to buy more energy efficient servers and/or HVAC kit was top of the list.

One thing that did make me chuckle a little was the next most popular reason for lack of action – good old procrastination. Here in the UK we call it dilly-dallying or faffing (and a few other variations that are not suitable for publication) but I have to say, hats off to the respondents for their honesty!

Many data centers are also looking at making use of emerging technologies to offset the lack of funding – in other words you are looking at ways to improve efficiency and make better use of what you already have. The obvious winner in this category is virtualization, with an astounding 72% of all respondents having already implemented this technology. What is also of interest in the section is the failure of Cloud Computing to make much of an impact. While only 14.9% had adopted Cloud Computing in some form or another, an additional 43% had simply rejected the idea. Maybe it was all hype after all..

So what does it all mean? Well it’s certainly worth a read, and it looks like 2010 will be an interesting year in the Data Center world, and with demand on resources showing little sign of slowing down it could be a challenging one!Here at 1E we are engaging with more and more companies who are looking to ‘do more with less’. As shown in the AFCOM report, money is tight so technologies like our NightWatchman Server Edition can help out in several key areas such as optimizing server usage, controlling sprawl and actively reducing the need for power and cooling.

Read the full AFCOM report here