November 10th, 2009

No more servers? Rackspace says IT workers are tired of them

Posted by Sam Diaz @ 10:00 am

Categories: Hardware Infrastructure, IT Management, Infrastructure

Tags: Rackspace, Information Technology, Survey, Information Technology Worker, Jason Hiner, Servers, Hardware, Sam Diaz

Who among IT workers has never been involved in a mad scramble - a crisis situation, if you will - because of server failure? Maybe it caused your site’s home page to go down or the e-mail system to become disabled or maybe the e-commerce system to crash. Whatever the problem, when a server crashes, it’s never any fun.

In today’s world of virtual everything, the idea of outsourcing server space is something that IT departments are seriously weighing. Today, Rackspace - which, of course, is in the business of providing the server space for businesses - launched a No More Servers campaign and released the results of a survey that found that half of all businesses surveyed would “love to never have to buy another server again.”

It’s been a week chock full of IT surveys. Yesterday, I posted some details on a survey that found that 40 percent of IT professionals (and an even higher number of executives) are still confused by cloud computing - and that could be delaying adoption in the enterprise. Jason Hiner has a posted some results as it relates to CIOs - a post yesterday that revealed that IT budget slashing, which was rampant last year, won’t be as bad this year. In a post today, Hiner revealed that 76 percent of CIOs time is spent on non-technical issues

We’ve written time and time again about how IT workers spend so much time reacting to issues and working to just keep the engine humming that there’s no time left for work that benefits the growth of the business. So what do they spend their time doing? The results of the survey paint that picture:

• IT teams said they spend about 60 percent of their time troubleshooting and managing servers.
• IT managers suffer from “server stress,” who cite the need to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week as one of the leading causes.
• More than half (51 percent) admit to making mistakes in the server capacity planning - with 15 percent buying too many servers and 36 percent underestimating their needs.

When it comes to their thoughts on new technologies, 35 percent considered themselves to be “proactive and slightly ahead of the curve” while 28 percent tend to be “cautious and reactive.”