(Enterprise Systems Magazine, Darwin Magazine, IDC)

Most IT managers don''t have the time to plan their storage spending. However, not planning storage spending can seriously jeopardize your technology platforms and the businesses they support. Learn how to budget for storage in this guide.

How this Saves Money
Instead of reacting to storage crises, plan spending ahead of time so that you can stay under budget and not pay penalties like rush shipping or overtime for IT staff to install storage quickly.

Action Plan
Follow this guide to budget your storage spending:

1. Get data about your current storage situation. The first step to planning the future is understanding the present, and you can''t understand the present without some numbers. Gather data on:

• Current capacity and utilization by different applications
• Utilization growth rates
• Planned and unplanned downtime
• Time spent managing storage
• Cost of labor

2. Analyze the data to determine which systems are the most storage-hungry. For example, your new e-commerce application may be growing at 200 percent per year, while a network file server may only be growing at 50 percent per year. These different systems require different storage management and budgeting.

3. Project how much storage will be required next year and in subsequent years. Make sure you associate the storage growth requirements with individual systems, since the cost of storage can vary widely from system to system. Don''t forget to include the impact of one-time events like mergers or new system launches that will impact "normal growth" of storage.

For example, if you know that senior management plans to buy a company that''s about half your size, and you will sell their products using your order entry system, you''ll need about 50% more storage in that system just for that event (assuming you can''t merge their storage capacity into your systems).

4. Differentiate between required storage spending (e.g. people, additions to high-utilization systems) and discretionary spending (e.g. overtime). Required spending is the baseline budget, but discretionary spending can be cut or postponed.

5. Create a "rainy day" fund for unplanned emergencies. The amount you should budget for this depends on how many unexpected events your company experiences, but about 20% of the total storage budget is a good guide.

6. Implement storage policies wherever possible. These can help your employees manage their storage requirements more effectively as well as reduce your costs. Also consider implementing a charge-back system for using company assets for discretionary items like MP3 files.

7. Consider implementing Storage Resource Management (SRM) software when the cost of managing storage starts to exceed the cost of buying more storage. With the data you gather in this planning process, you should be able to determine whether this has already happened, or project when in the future this will happen. McLean Report has an article on Storage Resource Management.

Bottom Line
As much as two thirds of IT budgets are consumed by storage and storage management. Projecting storage spending accurately is critical to managing the entire IT budget.

Want to Know More?
Enterprise Systems Magazine has an article about storage management in the era of tight budgets.

Darwin Magazine has an article titled "Why Squirrels Manage Storage Better Than You Do."

CCG Europe has an excellent IDC white paper about how Network Attached Storage (NAS) can be used to consolidate corporate storage.