Gartner: Budget cuts increases the chance of server failures

IT operations "are going to have to start to plan for the impact of increased equipment failure rates," says Peter Sondergaard, Gartner's global head of research in a Computerworld article. He made the statement at Gartner's Symposium/ITxpo 2009 conference, held in Orlando this week.

Sondergaard painted a picture in which companies are delaying the replacement of their servers and other IT equipment, despite a gradually improving economy. The number of such delayed replacements is expected to reach 10 percent where servers are concerned by next year. According to Gartner, the replacement schedule for three million servers has already been delayed around the world in this year alone.

On the whole, enterprise IT expenditure is expected to decline 6.8 percent this year, with a slow recovery back to 2008 levels expected to take place over the next three years.

With virtualization already having made such substantial inroads into the enterprise, my personal opinion is that this can only have some kind of positive effect on cloud computing as the enterprise explores additional methods of stretching existing hardware past it's optimal replacement date. How much equipment has your company put off replacing this year?

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Computerworld

Related Articles:
Don't forget about your IT budget
Forrester: IT budget cuts impact staff and salaries
IT moves forward despite economic squeeze
IT budgets are more targeted