Wed, April 08, 2009 — Computerworld — IT managers at Storage Networking World (SNW) this week said their budgets have been cut and they are concerned about the recession's impact on their departments over the next year. Even so, impromptu electronic audience polling indicated that they plan to bolster data security and roll out green technologies in 2009.

About 665 IT managers showed up for the event, about 8% fewer than last year, and it was clear that the economic downturn is on many minds. Of those who took part in a packed-hall electronic audience poll, 48% said they're somewhat worried about the slow economy's impact on their business and IT departments. Thirty-four percent said they are very worried about the recession, and only 18% said they're not worried at all.

Dave Burhop, CIO at the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles, said his budget was cut 3% this year, a move that affected the number of contractors his IT department hires. This year, Burhop is staying with internal resources and asking IT workers "to suck it up and work the 12-hour days."

Burhop said he's also deploying VMware in his data center to reduce server sprawl from 3,000 boxes to 1,000. The center supports 100,000 state employees, and cutting down on the number of servers will save not only on floor space but power consumption as well.

Fully 50% of SNW attendees polled said their top challenge in storage management this year will be IT budget constraints. Twenty-three percent cited the complexity of managing their infrastructure as their biggest issue, while 16% pointed to reliable back-up and recovery solutions and 11% worried about reliability and availability.

M. Andy Hansen, principal engineer for IT and server operations at Herbalife International of America Inc., said his company's budget is flat this year, and the business is no longer allowing any "one-off" IT projects. All project requests must be submitted by October, with no add-ons allowed after that.

Herbalife, with a data storage infrastructure that's expected to grow from 250TB now to 400TB by year's end, is now evaluating storage virtualization vendors so it can pool legacy systems and new EMC Symmetrix and Clariion arrays, Hansen said. He's already rolled out server virtualization for the vitamin vendor's 700 servers, 140 of which are now virtual machines.

"We're doing a lot of virtualization and I know we're going to have a positive power impact because of that," Hansen said, adding that company is looking at a variety of ways to save money. "One thing our company has been doing is you have to bring your own cup to work now. There are no Styrofoam cups anymore. I was talking to the director of facilities and he said we save [US]$70,000 a year because we don't buy Styrofoam cups anymore."