Full speed ahead on storage projects, despite economy's drag

Computerworld - The economy may be in a recession, and the stock market is experiencing convulsions -- prompting consulting firm Gartner Inc. to advise IT managers to prepare for possible hiring freezes and layoffs. But storage doesn't appear to be an area that many organizations are likely to target for budget cuts.

The reason, based on interviews with several attendees at the Storage Networking World conference in Dallas last week, is simple: Even with the economy struggling, the amount of data that users need to store continues to grow, with no end in sight. (See Cover Story, page 20.)

For example, Gary Pedersen, storage manager for the city of Plano, Texas, said the IT department there is moving forward on projects as planned. "Data is just coming out of everybody's ears," he said. "We have to keep up with it or we'll sink."

Plano's government is looking to fully revamp its storage infrastructure with new hardware and storage-area networks (SAN). "We're beyond adding on," Pedersen said. Cost is also a consideration, though. One possible move, he said, is a shift from Fibre Channel SAN technology to less expensive alternatives, such as iSCSI.

Paula Pollei, information systems manager at Materials Transportation Co. in Temple, Texas, said the economic downturn hasn't affected funding for a document management project. Her company, which makes food-processing equipment and robotic systems for changing truck batteries, plans to install the technology to help organize a vast collection of engineering plans and other documents.

"Everything's customized, so we have unique diagrams from every piece of equipment [we've sold]," Pollei said. When customers call for help or replacement parts, workers need easy access to documents -- so her company wants to automate that process.

But doing so will require a new storage system that will go well beyond the small, basic SAN that the company uses now, Pollei said. Her mission at Storage Networking World -- which was run jointly by Computerworld and the Storage Networking Industry Association -- was to find product information and possible vendors for the storage piece of the project.

The economy also isn't affecting plans at Leprechaun LLC, said Ann Jones, a network storage engineer at the Fort Worth, Texas-based data management services provider.

Because of new federal rules mandating additional audits of health care records-management practices, data is "coming online faster than we can keep up with it," Jones said. As a result, the company is gearing up to buy new storage and data backup technology.

Budget concerns could become an issue for some users if the economic picture keeps getting worse.

For example, the city of Bryan, Texas, is in the second year of a three-year disaster recovery project, and Gustavo Roman, its IT director, expects the work to continue as budgeted. "You don't want to have a knee-jerk reaction," Roman said. But he added that funding issues might arise in the future if the crisis continues.