Doing more with less

18. May, 2009 0 Comments

I wrote an article recently on opportunities for storage teams in a down economy. It was published as a byline by ECT.

http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/it-management/66672.html

One of the central themes of the articles was getting into a “doing more with less” mind frame. A key part of this mind frame is to go away from throwing hardware or software at a problem and get into a solution mindset. Sure the means to solving a problem may require additional hardware or software but they should be part of the solution and not the solution itself. The focus needs to be on the solution – eliminating the point of contention, failure or risk while maximizing existing assets.

How do you maximize existing assets you ask?

There is no smoking gun here but you can always start by first finding out what is it that you have in your environment – i.e. start by getting a full inventory. This should not only be for “production” but for all hardware and software including stuff that was marked for disposal. If someone marked it for disposal, find out if such actions are really warranted or based on some vendor saying that the hardware is no good. You may be surprised that the hardware works perfectly well in dev/qa or test environments where a 4-hour turnaround on parts is not necessary. Also explore third-party support for parts on such devices. Thanks to ebay and other online marketplace/auction sites, a lot of old gear can be supported pretty adequately by obtaining parts through alternate channels.

Couple other things that you can also explore are: Moving non-production or performance critical applications and/or environments to lower cost disk tiers such as ATA and converting physical systems into virtual systems (regardless of the corporate strategy for server virtualization, all of the storage related servers can all be converted into virtual servers).

When times get tough and there is a belt tightening effect, there are plenty of things that can be done to stop wasteful spending. But there is nothing limiting you from getting creative.

- Ashish Nadkarni, GlassHouse Principal Consultant