Many firms will either have to upgrade their datacentres or outsource operations to third parties if they are to take advantage of new server and storage technology, according to experts. And in most cases, the IT managers involved do not even know the full extent of the problems they face.

A new survey by the Aperture Research Institute (ARI) questioned 100 datacentre professionals in a range of sectors. Over a third worked for firms operating more than six datacentres, with 28 per cent responsible for 10 facilities or more.

The research found that 64 per cent were not planning or building new datacentres, indicating that most plan to add new technologies to the facilities they already have, many of which were built over four years ago. But ARI’s Steven Yellen said older facilities are just not up to the demands being placed on them, particularly when it comes to supplying enough electricity to power and cool new blade and rack servers coming onto the market. According to the research, 87 per cent said they had either already installed blade servers or were planning to do so.

“It is possible they have specialised servers, or racks that are half full, but frankly [the findings suggest many respondents] do not even know that their resources are close to falling over. They may lack the management discipline to identify that all of their racks are designed to support 2kW, and if they put more servers here they will risk hot spots,” Yellen said.

This lack of foresight will create major problems in the near future, added Yellen, who said better management tools able to help optimise cost and performance are probably the best way forward open to those unwilling or unable to invest in new datacentres.

“The first thing to do is get control of the environment and ask, ‘What capacity can I support today, and do I have another three years?’ If they do, all right, but if not, they might need to consider either building a new datacentre, or an outsourcing strategy,” Yellen said.

Hardware and software vendors know that datacentre management is an ongoing issue for many firms, and have packaged a range of solutions to address the problem.

Storage vendor 3Par last month announced a packaged virtualisation management solution that it said can quadruple administrative efficiency and provision virtualised servers and storage within minutes, rather than weeks. 3cV combines 3Par’s InServ Storage Server product to support virtual domains and thin provisioning technologies, along with HP’s BladeSystem c-Class and the VMware Infrastructure server virtualisation suite.

EMC, meanwhile, has updated its InVista storage area network (SAN) virtualisation suite, which is designed to improve datacentre resilience and improve SAN performance and management.

Deployed on Cisco and Brocade SAN switches, the Invista 2.0 software supports a “split-path” architecture based on separate switches at different points in the SAN, explained Robert Emsley, senior director of software product marketing at EMC. “It is the ability to separate the control element from the solution, so if you have a datacentre split across a campus, for example, it provides a level of high availability you cannot get with an appliance-controller-based solution. With InVista, if one part of the SAN needs to be upgraded, the other part can remain operational,” he said.