You are about to click send on the email that contains your proposed storage budget, and you get the uneasy feeling that, because of the current economy, half of it is going to get rejected. Or you have already submitted your budget, and you have been asked to explain why each of these projects is needed and if any of them can be cut. In either case, you will need to explain to people that are possibly not themselves storage experts why you need what you need.

Each submission to the budget or each request for justification of the budget will need to articulate to the reviewers the current environment, the impact of doing nothing, the cost of alternative solutions, and the cost-saving or efficiency-increasing advantages of the proposed project. Here are some things to keep in mind as you plan your defense.

Establish A Baseline

The first step is to make sure that the projects on the budget truly are defendable. Different storage projects will require different types of justification. In almost all cases, you should know what the baseline is for your environment. Look for a storage reporting and monitoring solution that will allow you to develop that baseline.

“Understanding where you are starting and having the ability to report on progress made of a project is critical,” says Ken Barth, CEO of Dallas-based Tek-Tools (www.tek-tools.com). “Whether it is a cost reduction or avoidance project or a performance improvement project, having the facts in hand prior to implementing the project as well as being able to assure budget decision makers that you will be able to provide concrete reporting on the results of the project are going to help sway budget dollars your way.”

Often, budget decisions come down to an either/or decision. Executive management wants to invest the limited dollars that they have on projects they know will have the most return. Many requests for budget dollars will come with some form of return-on-investment claims; having the ability to document the delta of where the storage situation is prior to the project and then being able to prove the gains made will provide greater confidence in your claims.

If buying a new storage management application is not in the cards for you, there are less automated ways to establish this baseline. For example, you can manually inspect the individual servers and storage in your environment and then aggregate them into a spreadsheet. Most OSes and storage arrays include basic reporting abilities. While not as easy and as real-time as a specific software application, it does give you that critical baseline.

Keep Track Of ROI

Once the baseline is established and the ability to accurately report on the results is assured, the next step in budget dollar defense is to document the gains of each particular project. Projects can typically be categorized as ones that will avoid cost by reducing or eliminating future purchases or as projects that will improve the data center by increasing performance or staff productivity. Ideally, you should select projects that address all of the categories.

“We find that the projects that are getting funded are those that can not only provide a reduction in 2009 capital outlay but also provide long-term deliverables like improved performance and increased staff efficiency,” says Craig Nunes, vice president of marketing at 3PAR (www.3par.com). “Customers that, as part of their budget submission, can show how they are taking advantage of new technologies like thin provisioning to buy less additional storage [while delivering] improved performance and staff efficiency are the most successful in getting budget approval.”

For projects that are more performance-focused and where an expenditure must be made, it is important to include information about potential lost revenue or employee productivity as a result of an application or system that can no longer keep pace with current demands. In tough economic times, keeping the customers you have is critical, so explaining how failure to maintain expected performance levels is important.

Additionally, performance-based investments can also have a cost-reduction quality to them, according to Woody Hutsell, executive vice president of solid-state drive manufacturer Texas Memory Systems (www.texmemsys.com). “A higher-performing storage solution that can improve application response time in many cases will do so using less overall power, space, and cooling costs. Often the investment will pay for itself in the reduction of physical devices.”

Protect Disaster Recovery

Another project type that will often come under scrutiny during tough economic times is the backup and recovery or disaster recovery process. Depending on the organization, these projects may be the hardest to defend. On paper, they look like just another expense, and executive management may decide to roll the dice and delay improving the company’s data recovery capabilities.

You will most likely want to factor in the cost of downtime and the cost to recover in the event of a disaster as part of your justification, but Justin Moore, CEO of hybrid on-premise and cloud storage backup provider Axcient (www.axcient.com), also suggests structuring your data protection project requests around reducing the cost of the current backup operation. “By tapping into new technologies and techniques that are now available, a backup administrator can improve their overall protection and DR associated costs for less than the cost of supporting and maintaining the old infrastructure while improving uptime and continuity,” he says.

Spending Can Be Cheaper Than Not Spending

Any request for funding or justification response should also factor in the impact of doing nothing, because a common response to proposed expenditures is, “Can’t you just make do with what we have until next year?”

“Doing nothing is something that is often brought up in backup or archive projects,” says Richard April, vice president of marketing at Copan Systems (www.copansystems.com). “The reality is, especially in storage, there really is no such thing. Once you are out of disk space, you have to do something, and so in reality, ‘doing nothing’ is really buying additional storage. When defending a storage project like archiving, you need to explain that just making do will have costs associated with buying more expensive storage, maintaining that storage, and backing that storage up.”

Make sure that an explanation is given as to why keeping the status quo will be more expensive than moving forward with the project.

by George Crump