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IT Heartache

It's been tough in IT for, what, about the last 10 years? It's gotten even worse in the last two, as you've been asked to not only do more with less, but sometimes do more with nothing!

How have these budget cuts affected you? How does it feel to lose co-workers or even be the one to give them their pink slips? How do you keep your head up and respond to these challenges? How do you prioritize spending when you're dealing with chump change?

I want to bring your stories to life in a cover story for Redmond magazine. I want your war stories and advice. E-mail me directly at dbarney@redmondmag.com and we may feature your experiences in this upcoming article!

Posted by Doug Barney on March 03, 2010 at 10:21 AM


Reader Comments

Fri, Mar 5, 2010 BWJ Texas

At the company I currently work for, the 2009 budget was severly reduced. However, thanks to the great leadership and direction of the CEO and CFO, our company is in good financial shape and 2010 is looking better, although not great. Last year, as will be the first half of this year, was simply painful. Although I did not lose my job, I feel like my skills are languishing. I came to this company because they wanted me to build up their infrastructure. They've never spent a lot of money on IT, but were ready for IT to help employees work better and even help in modernizing many things to help with sales and marketing. I had high hopes about virtualizing servers and maybe even apps, implementing DFS to get files closer to the end user and quicker to open, a new ERP system, and other things, but that was all put on hold. I've been very very board. Simple break fix stuff for the last year and a half. But hey, maybe it's because the economy here in Texas is better than some other parts of the country, or because I have needed and wanted skills that I've kept current, but at least I have a good job still. That's a blessing that I give thanks for quite a bit.

Wed, Mar 3, 2010 Greg Lara NY, NY

Doug, My IT budget for fiscal year 2010 was severely reduced, at a time when I'd planned a migration to an iSCSI SAN and a Hyper-V cluster rather than go through a standard server refresh. After a lot of product research and some creative planning, I came up with, and got approval for, a migration plan that would accomplish all these goals on a shoestring budget - less than $15k. A number of new players in the lower-mid range of the iSCSI SAN spectrum has driven down prices quite a bit lately, so finding a good performing unit with great specs for less than $9k wasn't terribly difficult. Then, using an older server as a temporary ESXi host, I was able to rebuild two of our newer servers into the Hyper-V cluster and begin the process of virtualizing our existing servers. Part of the "sell" of the project was making clear that by not proactively eliminating our 5-6 year-old servers, we'd wind up scrambling to replace them as they fail, a process that is neither cost-effective nor friendly to maintaining productivity or data integrity. Needless to say, I'm thrilled that I've been able to get this done during what has proven to be one of the most difficult financial periods my company has gone through.

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