Data Centers Understaffed and Underutilized?

The following news snippet from SearchStorage.com caught my eye and I couldn’t resist sharing it here:

Symantec Corp.'s State of the Data Center 2008 report paints a picture of understaffed data centers and underutilized storage systems.

The report, based on a survey of 1,600 enterprise data center managers and executives, found storage utilization at 50%. The survey also discovered that staffing remains a crucial issue, with 36% of respondents saying their firms are understaffed. Only 4% say they are overstaffed. Furthermore, 43% state that finding qualified applicants is a problem.

Really interesting numbers, particularly when it comes to staffing issues. With so many layoffs and other cutbacks happening, it’s not so surprising that firms feel understaffed. However, with the national unemployment rate reaching 7.2 percent for December, I don’t think finding qualified applicants will be as much of a problem in 2009. As for the underutilization of storage systems, this is a major contributor to high data center costs. If corporate budgets continue to get slashed, I can guarantee that virtualization is going to stay right at the top of most data center managers to-do lists for the foreseeable future.

(By the way, if you’re an unemployed techie, you might want to check out this article from CIO.com. Socialtext is offering its social networking tools free to laid-off workers who want to form alumni networks and share job leads.)