IT managers want the benefits of deploying new storage technologies but said a lack of time and management support are stifling those aspirations.

Several users interviewed at the Storage Decisions conference in New York this week said they haven"t even had the time or support to create a cost-benefit model for storage resource management and tiered storage management projects.

"My problem is we"re too busy. Every year, we put storage resource management on the budget, and every year, it just falls off," said Edwin Alsberg, director of IT operations at The Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. in New York.

John Strano, manager of capacity and performance management at Pfizer Inc. in New York, said IT managers in general don"t have time to deploy sophisticated data management tools, "let alone get the value out of them."

Strano said he has developed a plan for a tiered storage infrastructure with six levels, ranging from high-end primary to secondary storage to network-attached storage, but has so far been too busy to deploy more than three levels.

An impromptu electronic survey of about 500 users at the conference by sponsor TechTarget found that 66 percent don"t have time to put together a basic cost model or a data value model for an information life-cycle management project. Twenty-eight percent can"t build out a tiered storage cost model, and only 8 percent have completed work on an ILM strategy.

Another conference survey found that 69 percent of the respondents receive some executive support but no ongoing support for projects, 22 percent receive no management support, and 9 percent get all the management support they need.

Richard Scannell, vice president of corporate development at GlassHouse Technologies Inc., a consulting firm in Framingham, Mass., suggested that IT officials may have more success in gaining management backing for storage projects when proposals detail probable effects on the business. What"s most important, he said, is creating a way to deploy storage that serves a direct business need, such as speeding the completion of trades at a brokerage.

Craig Taylor, associate director of open systems at Chicago Mercantile Exchange Holdings Inc., said he did gain management support as his unit built out a five-tier storage infrastructure that has eliminated regular daily backups to tape and greatly reduced power consumption in his data center.

Taylor advised IT managers to provide executives with simple lines of reasoning for supporting projects. "Look at it from the application level -- e-mail, regulatory reports, Word documents," he said.

The archival tier of the exchange"s storage infrastructure is made up of a relatively inexpensive Advanced Technology Attachment array from Copan Systems Inc. in Longmont, Colo., that stores 228TB in a 10-square-foot area in his data center, freeing up valuable space and using far less electricity than a traditional midtier disk array or a tape silo.

The new array has increased backup and restore rates by 228 percent compared with the exchange"s old tape silo, Taylor said.

Scannell also said that IT managers can gain management support for storage projects by calculating a run rate or the financial cost of an inefficient storage infrastructure over a period of years. Such efforts can demonstrate to upper-level management that storage operating costs escalate over time, he said, especially for keeping old data on primary storage.