Planning for the Rebound Recession

According to many economists, after we work our way through this current recession we will have a period of economic growth, possibly as short as a few quarters but more likely a year or maybe even two. And then, like a rebound headache, we will have a rebound recession that may be worse and longer than the current one we are in.

I'll let the political blog sites argue about whether or not this is true and whose fault it is. But from an IT perspective, what can you do to prepare for this, just in case? Once again, flexibility raises its hand -- and overreaction to the current decline or false euphoria over a supposed turnaround are recipes for disaster.

How you handle a rebound recession has a lot to do with how you handle this one and how you respond when things start to improve. It really comes down to selecting flexible systems with the ability to scale. Not only the ability to scale large, although that is important, but to scale large in very granular increments.

From a storage perceptive that means selecting solutions that have thin provisioning capabilities like those from 3PAR, HDS, Compellent, and others. As we discussed in our thin provisioning article, this approach allows you to add new projects but does not require that you buy all the storage upfront. Because if that rebound recession does come, then you may be stuck with a project that never reaches its projected capacity and a bunch of storage that never gets used.

As I covered in a previous entry here, this also includes having the ability to use the reclamation capabilities that these companies, and now Symantec, are providing so as you free up space from a project that is in decline, the storage capacity can be released back to the global pool.This is also an area where disk-based archive systems can play a role. You want the ability to roll entire projects off to a capacity-focused system like those offered by Permabit, NexSan, Copan, and others. If you are virtualizing servers, these systems can also be used to move entire server images out of production. Many data centers are already struggling with virtual server sprawl. If we see an economic ramp-up and then a sharp downturn, there can be storage gains made by moving these unneeded servers out of production.

The advantage of a disk archive in either the case of a project or an entire server is that it can be quickly restored when needed. This leads to being more aggressive about decommissioning unused virtual servers because the work and time involved to bring the server back online is minimized.

Flexible storage management is going to be key, and selecting the right technology today will lay the foundation for the future. Gone, probably forever, are the days when you can overlook utilizing only 20 percent of your storage capacity.

George Crump is founder of Storage Switzerland , which provides strategic consulting and analysis to storage users, suppliers, and integrators. Prior to Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest integrators.

InformationWeek Analytics has published an independent analysis what IT and corporate professionals are looking for in business optimization. Download the report here (registration required).6668