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In the UK, 50 per cent of those surveyed indicated that server virtualization was a primary concern for investment, with 46 per cent citing storage consolidation as a priority. Additionally, 42 per cent reported data centre consolidation as a priority, making these three areas the most common CIO spending priorities for 2013.
70 per cent of UK CIOs planning a consolidation project reported the need to reduce the cost of managing distributed servers at the branch office layer as the key driver for their programmes. Other reasons provided for undertaking consolidation projects included data security (61 per cent) and a desire for greater control of application and server upgrades (52 per cent).
Risto Wieland, director of IT at Swiss Re explained why they embarked upon a consolidation project. “We needed to simplify our network management by consolidating applications back to the data centre and removing as many servers as possible. We chose to implement a wide area network (WAN) optimisation solution from Riverbed to ensure application performance. As a result we have removed hundreds of servers from our regional data centres and remote offices, and consolidated 95 per cent of all applications to the two Zurich data centres. This has reduced the amount of time spent on network management which is a huge benefit and both local backups and backups over the WAN are now no longer necessary.”
The study also revealed in the UK that the biggest barrier to embarking on a virtualisation/consolidation project was the cost of initial set-up, with 53 per cent of those not undertaking a project citing this reason. Complexity as well as application performance over the WAN were also reported as concerns by 51 per cent and 45 per cent respectively.
Paul Coates, regional vice president at Riverbed UK & South Africa comments on the UK findings. “In the UK, security fears around consolidation are less pronounced than other regions, with 61 per cent citing this as a key driver for undertaking a consolidation project compared to a European average of 68 per cent. The findings also echo recent conversations I’ve had with customers and partners in the UK around the cost savings benefits of managing distributed servers at branch office layer, with 70 per cent of UK CIOs citing this as a critical factor for embarking on a consolidation project, versus the Pan – European average of just 58 per cent.”
“This study shows that more CIOs than ever recognise the importance of centralizing technology and data to gain efficiencies. Although for some, barriers must be overcome before they can consider virtualizing or consolidating their applications, or removing branch office servers, the results demonstrate that most decision makers understand the cost and time savings that these projects can bring,” said Willem Hendrickx, SVP EMEA at Riverbed.
This survey was conducted by Vanson Bourne, the independent specialist technology market research company on behalf of Riverbed Technology. 400 CIOs in France, Germany, Poland, United Arab Emirates and United Kingdom were questioned as part of the survey.
