Cheer Up and Spend Some Money

Let’s not kid ourselves, we are in a recession and bad news is all over the place.  Credit risk, Bear Stearns, and other headline stories are making for a morbid beginning to 2008.  I am already looking for the bright side of this ugliness and hope that I never hear the word ‘subprime’ again.  The current worldwide economy will impact IT budgets and ESG is already receiving inquiries that revolve around customers getting the most for their money.  Here are some ideas on solutions that may help you weather the IT recession storm.

• Data de-duplication/compression anything.  Our research suggests customers are getting between 10 and 20X data reduction from these solutions which means they don’t have to buy as much storage capacity. 
• Wide Area File Services or Wide Area Accelerators.  These solutions help maximize existing bandwidth by intelligently identifying the bytes that have already been sent from one site to another and never resending the same bytes twice.  There is a much more technical explanation, but I will let the vendors tell you all about it.  These solutions make remote office application performance better and facilitate disaster recovery without requiring a huge pipe between two sites.
• Thin provisioning.  You can trick applications and databases into thinking there is more storage allocated than there really is.  The best part is tricking the administrators who always ask for more than they need. You can avoid wasting storage.
• Server virtualization.  Enough has been said on this topic.  Power and cooling savings and reduced hardware expenditures make this an easy investment to rationalize.  Try and use anywhere that is feasible. 
• Search/review/archiving software.  These are electronic discovery process staples.  If your company does business in the United States, you will be looking through e-mails, files, backup tapes and a host of other data sources.  It is only a matter of time.  You can either pay attorneys by the hour to read files manually or make an investment to automate some of the process.  You may actually be able to use some of this technology for other things which makes it easier to justify.

There are probably more that I cannot think of right now, but this list should get you through the next couple of months.  Think positively.