Data centres wrest control from users

Rise of network computer and e-commerce leads to recognition that decentralised data is inefficient for business.

Companies are centralising their data again, spurred on by electronicentralised data is inefficient for business. commerce and the rise of the network computer (NC).

According to the third annual EMC-sponsored survey of senior IT executives - which questioned 700 firms across the US and Europe - the number of data centres regaining control of critical servers rose 11 per cent over the past year to 92 per cent of respondents. The trend reflects a recognition that decentralised data is inefficient, the report says, although the move will almost inevitably require increased IT budgets.

Sixty-eight per cent of organisations said they are working on storing data centrally. They want users to request information from central servers rather than let them keep and manage data on local platforms. This enables data centres to ensure there is no duplication of tasks and to free up departmental servers to run applications, rather using them for storage.

Mike Maunder, UK and Ireland marketing manager at EMC, cited examples of firms with about 200 distributed platforms, each managed by different business departments, with a few storing as much as one terabyte of information locally - much of it duplicated elsewhere in the organisation.

'Companies are saying they have to take control of how their data is looked after,' he said. 'All the business wants to know is that the data is right.'

Maunder said organisations are attracted to NCs, which provide virtually no local storage but pull data and applications from a server as required.

Almost half the respondents said that central control and centrally managed storage are the top two benefits of this architecture, more significant than the low purchase price, which is often cited as the primary benefit of NCs.

E-commerce is also triggering the increase in demand for storage capacity.

'How are companies going to take advantage of e-commerce if they have data distributed across the organisation? Someone needs to take control,' said Maunder.