A Asia Pacific State of the Data Center report 2008, released by Symantec, says that Asian IT companies are making steps to reduce data center costs through automation, server consolidation, and virtualization initiatives. The survey also found that the employees in most data centers are not knowledgeable enough, hardware is underutilized, and disaster recovery plans in many data centers were out of date.

A summary of the results of the Asian report has been published in ZDnet Asia.

Suzie Tan, Symantec's managing director for Malaysia says for ZDnet that key initiatives data centers were pursuing to "do more with less" included automation of routine tasks, as indicated by 47% of respondents, server virtualization/consolidation (43%) and reducing data center complexity (40%).

The respondents in the Symantec poll said that their data center servers were operating at just 65% of capacity in 2008, down from 70% in 2007, while data center storage utilization was lower at 60%.

Symantec recommends to IT businesses which want to achieve greater efficiencies and cost savings to use heterogeneous software. According to the company this will allow data center managers to achieve more with limited resources by utilizing existing server and storage resources, freeing up IT staff and protecting and managing data, servers and applications with a single platform. Symantec also recommends:

- The usage of green IT, or software to reduce energy consumption and increase space utilization by providing server and storage efficiencies

- A comprehensive data protection strategy that supports the broadest set of disk, tape and virtual library vendors

- Storage management technologies for better use of storage resources by optimizing storage utilization

- Adopting a management framework that provides architectural flexibility and supports multiple virtualization platforms and physical environment

- For disaster recovery - holistic data protection across virtual environments, remote offices, desktops, laptops, servers, applications and databases, that can quickly recover data and systems.

The Asian report is based on interviews with data center employees in 414 companies in Japan, China, India, South Korea, Australia, Singapore and Malaysia. It has been conducted in September and October 2008.