There usually is budget to fix things that are truly broken, but waiting until things break isn’t a very good way to upgrade the infrastructure — nor a sound career strategy. Being proactive makes for great conference table discussion, but in order to get funded, a project must present a cost saving (or revenue) opportunity that’s dramatic. Incremental improvements just don’t make the cut, but unfortunately, home runs are few and far between.

Given the staff shortages that IT has had to deal with over the past several years, there are lots of places within the environment that probably need attention. As is often the case, problems like this can present an opportunity for smart VARs.

IT needs to find a way to get better without asking for big project dollars. Improving operational efficiency can save admin time, and improving storage efficiency can save space or postpone a capacity upgrade. One idea is to simply replace the boot drive in a server with a small SATA SSD on a DIMM. Replacing a hard disk boot drive with a solid-state drive can improve performance, and using the available drive slot for a higher-capacity disk drive can add a terabyte or more of net-new (local) storage space to the server.

Another area is backup. It’s typically the job that the newest IT person gets stuck with. This means there are probably a few things about the backup system that the current admin doesn’t know — maybe a lot of things. It could be something as simple as tuning or configuration, or a minor upgrade. I’m not saying VARs should go around giving away PS time; just get creative and find a way to get your technical folks into an account, even if there isn’t a PO this time. Call it an investment, but getting into the data center is a great way to find out what’s broken and likely to get the budget. And showing your value up front is a great way to get a call when those projects do come up.

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Postponing disk purchases is a great way to do this, if they can find a way to get more storage space on their existing disk drives. Last time we looked at several tools that can help find unused storage space in your infrastructure. Now we’re going to look at getting more performance without buying more spindles.

Traditionally, throwing disks at an IOPS or throughput problem has been an accepted strategy. But it’s inefficient and produces diminishing returns, as increasing RAID set spindle counts, or “short stroking” disk drives, underutilizes disk space and increases overall costs per gigabyte. Automated storage tiering is more effective way to get better performance because it applies solid-state storage where it’s needed through intelligent caching. Two companies we spoke with at SNW have products in this space.

Dataram has a solid-state solution called XcelaSAN that drops into an existing SAN infrastructure as a transparent cache that’s allocated to individual LUNs as needed for performance. The 2U appliance sits in the data path between the switch and disk array as a Tier 0 caching layer. This provides flexibility that other SSD implementations don’t, since it can be applied to any LUN and complements, rather than replaces, disk drives. The net effect is greatly increased performance without buying more spindles.

Storspeed provides application-aware caching in a NAS environment. Also implemented between servers and multiple file-based storage systems on the network, this appliance inspects traffic between applications and storage and builds profiles of performance requirements. Then, cache is applied to applications as needed, improving overall performance without buying more disks or faster filer heads.

The VAR play here is to take these solutions into companies that didn’t buy their primary storage from you. This disruptive move can get you into a new account at the right level, showing them a solution their existing array supplier probably won’t.

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While at SNW a few weeks ago, I spent some quality time with several IT professionals from two Phoenix-area municipalities. The discussion turned to how they liked the show and what they thought of the products and technology they were seeing. “Are you getting info on products that you need?” I asked. They made it clear that while there were certainly some interesting seminars and presentations, they weren’t seeing everything they needed.

In this climate of budget cuts or zero budget growth, what would help them is to see products that improve storage efficiency: those that can enable them to extend the useful life of existing storage infrastructure a couple more years. Since a big driver for storage purchases is running out of capacity, finding a way to increase effective capacity on existing arrays could postpone storage purchases.

We joked about how this topic was decidedly unsexy and not likely to get much attention from manufacturers. Here’s where the smart storage VAR could step in. By taking these concerns to heart and finding some alternatives, you could solve an immediate issue for them and capture a customer for the long term.

As we explained in a recent article “Doing more with less money,” a few well-spent dollars can give an IT organization the ability to postpone a bigger storage purchase. Real-time tools that identify over-allocated LUNs or VMDK files could “find” a lot of free space. Tek-Tools, Logic Monitor and Akorri all have products in this space. Another solution from DynamicOps can establish an automated process for creating new VMs and allocating resources efficiently from the get-go.

Another way to achieve the same objective is provided by Storwize. The company’s solution gives you in-line data reduction of 65% or more for primary and secondary storage via NFS and CIFS. Using the “penny saved is a penny earned” rationale, putting this appliance in front of a NAS can increase available storage right away, without buying more disk. And, when a storage upgrade is eventually purchased, the Storwize appliance can increase that capacity as well.

The point is that even though your customers may not have much budget now, they do have needs. If you can get creative and show them solutions that provide some relief and improve their storage efficiency, at a reasonable price point, you can demonstrate your value as a supplier that understands their pain.

In our next post we’ll look at another driver for storage purchases, performance upgrades, and some alternatives to throwing disk at the problem.