Current findings from TheBoardRoomAdvisors, LLC are showing the average data center runs at 20% capacity and most companies spend 80% of their IT budgets on maintenance. Its no wonder business thinks IT costs are high. These costs are based on the current way most organizations run their data centers.
The average server utilization over the past 5 years has been at 20% so the excess capacity can be reserved for spikes in activity that may occur once per week or once per month for generating reports, statements, etc. New advances in technology such as virtualization, clustering,cloud computing, etc can mitigate the need for much of the excess capacity kept in reserve in the data center. However, we are still seeing new servers coming in the doors of most organizations on a daily basis and the existing servers remain underutilized.
To make matters worse, one still has to pay for the space, power, heating and cooling of all this equipment whether its running at 10% or 80% capacity. Most organization do a poor job of managing to this metric and consequently are spending the bulk of their IT budgets on the maintenance and support for these under utilized systems. If they could move to adapt some of the newer solutions and increase utilization, more of the IT budget could be allocated to new innovative solutions vs just keeping the lights on.
