Background
This question was asked of the Wikibon community in light of the economic crisis we're facing. Please refer to the 'Comments' tab to see individual responses. A summary of those responses follows the question below.
What will be the top three strategies to deal with storage budget cuts in 2009? Here's a list of five to get ideas going:
- Headcount reductions
- Extend the use of existing equipment
- Avoid tier 1 where possible
- Implement server and storage virtualization to simplify migration and provisioning
- Outsource storage services
Summary of Responses
As 2008 winds down, most IT departments are facing budget cuts of between 5-30% in 2009. Many Wikibon users have lived through downturns in the past two decades. While perhaps not as severe as this current economic crisis, these experiences have taught IT executives to find ways to stretch budgets through a variety of measures focused both on CAPEX and OPEX reduction. Not surprisingly, most of these moves are highly tactical although executives do cite some architectural maneuvers that are more strategic in nature.
Here's a brief summary of the responses from Wikibon users. In addition to negotiating harder for better pricing/deeper discounts, the community recommends the following tactical moves:
- Renegotiate existing contracts. Use whatever leverage possible (e.g. a pending new purchase, reduced service levels, etc) to renegotiate maintenance contracts, reduce monthly software charges and extend leases to lower monthly run rates;
- Cut non-essential projects and re-scope very large initiatives to reduce overall expenses;
- Re-examine personnel and reduce headcount for non-essential functions;
- Selectively outsource where it will reduce costs;
- Eliminate professional services expenses where possible by shifting responsibilities to internal staff, recognizing this will reduce service levels.
In addition, several suggestions were made that were more strategic and architectural in nature, focused on improving return on assets in general. Specifically, as it relates to storage, users cited storage virtualization, if in place, as an alternative approach to management to:
- Migrate data to less expensive storage tiers;
- Ease administrative overhead and maximize staff productivity, especially in the face of headcount reductions;
- Minimize migration expense (planning and disruption);
- Improve negotiation leverage, specifically where heterogeneous storage virtualization is in play (i.e. you can choose any array)
- Support lower disaster recovery costs allowing diversity at the source and target.
Finally, Wikibon users discussed the most obvious tactic to reduce expense-- hitting the delete key. By freeing up wasted space and eliminating unnecessary data users can see a 50% improvement in free space. The challenge is this is easier said than done and requires a discovery and data classification exercise that is often cumbersome and politically risky (i.e. what if a business user really needs the data down the road).
Regardless, the bottom line is that endless LUN management, the search for contiguous free space and painful migrations are productivity killers that waste storage space and reduce negotiation leverage by locking in buyers. Storage professionals that have architected a virtualized infrastructure are in better shape to take advantage of that capability in a downturn, somewhat sacrificing service levels to lower cost. Organizations that do not possess this capability need to seriously consider the cost of implementing such an approach or risk overspending in this economic crisis.
Please check out the Peer Incite research from this question:
Peer Incite: Grant, a Sr. Storage Admin at a large bank discusses how heterogeneous storage virtualization can help reduce the budget for 2009.
Action Item:
Footnotes: