Storage in Crisis?

Ever notice how everything is a crisis lately or, even better, a meltdown? It seems as if every article I read on storage, virtualization or just about anything else in IT starts with "given the economic crisis, downturn, or disaster." I include myself among the guilty, by the way. Do you ever get the feeling we have made the situation worse? That we have talked (or written) ourselves into a deeper hole than there actually was?

I am not minimizing the negative effect of the mortgage fiasco of last summer, nor am I saying that if you, unfortunately, are among the unemployed that this is not a serious situation for you. But to compare this situation to the Great Depression or the misery index of 1979 or even the IT bubble burst of 2001 is a bit dramatic and, for the most part, overstated, especially from an IT perspective.

This is backed up by the recent Symantec "2008 State of the Data Center Survey," where 84 percent of budgets were set to increase or stay the same over the next 12 months. In fairness, the survey was taken right at the beginning of the "crisis," but, according to Symantec, they re-sampled again a few months into it and have compared notes with other researchers, and they stand by their numbers.

Think about that -- 84 percent! Interestingly, what the spending focus of these budgets tends to be on is optimization of what is already in the data center and controlling costs. This means further optimization of the server virtualization, and better storage utilization through archive and data compression or deduplication.

It is not just further optimization and efficiency that is on the minds of these CIOs. Disaster recovery, always popular when people are worried about the economy, is still capturing their attention. One in three stated that their plan was inadequate, citing remote offices and virtual servers as key issues.Think about it: You want to get smarter about how you spend your IT dollars, and you are looking to increase efficiency, utilization, and protect corporate assets. You more than likely have money to accomplish those tasks, and you are looking for IT suppliers to help.

The most encouraging result of the survey if you are an IT professional is that 36 percent of data centers report being understaffed and are having trouble finding and/or retaining staff. Combining this data tends to suggest that if you know storage (I would recommend knowing Fibre Channel) or if you understand server virtualization, you should be able to survive the "crisis" OK. If you are not strong in these areas, I suggest you get so, quickly. I might also suggest getting good at both. A constant challenge for virtualization projects is understanding the storage management that goes along with it.

If you are an IT supplier, and Byte and Switch has more than a few readers who are, then I would say overall the news is encouraging. I think that budgets have come down from the survey report, but customers still need to solve IT challenges. As you can read from the news releases on this site, suppliers that create greater efficiencies or ROIs are having respectable and, in some cases, record quarters.

Again, I am not denying that there is some pullback, and this can be a serious situation. But as an IT professional or an IT supplier, there are still projects that can be funded and worked on. At least from our perspective, this is not a meltdown or even, dare I say it a crisis.

— 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.6668