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How to win approval for upgrades: Link them to business benefits

Drew Rob has another good article over at Processor.com about various tips and strategies on how to gain approval for hardware (or software) purchases with some comments by yours truly.

My tips and advice that are quoted in the story include to link technology resources to business needs impact which may be common sense, however still a time tested effective technique.

Instead of speaking tech talk such as Performance, capacity, availability, IOPS, bandwidth, GHz, frames or packets per second, VMs to PM or dedupe ratio, map them to business speak, that is things that finance, accountants, MBAs or other management personal understand.

For example, how many transactions at a given response time can be supported by a given type of server, storage or networking device.

Or, put a different way, with a given device, how much work can be done and what is the associated monetary or business benefit.

Likewise, if you do not have a capacity plan for servers, storage, I/O and networking along with software and facilities covering performance, availability, capacity and energy demands now is the time to put one in place.

More on capacity and performance planning later, however for now, if you want to learn more, check Chapter 10 (Performance and Capacity Planning) in my book Resilient Storage Networks: Designing Flexible and Scalable Data Infrastructure: Elsevier).

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

greg