The outlook for economic growth in 2008 is questionable, according to Adexis VP of Operations and Storage Consulting Nick Cellentani.

He points to the great deal of uncertainty in reports from news media -- and a recent seminar presented at The Ohio State University business school titled "The Coming Recession: How bad will it be?"

"This type of thinking has senior management battening down the hatches to weather a potential economic storm," Cellentani says.

One way to weather the storm, he points out, is to reduce operational costs by optimizing the computing and storage infrastructure.

Companies wanting to achieve operational cost savings in 2008 should explore:

• Storage Consolidation
• Server Virtualization
• Data Deduplication
• Data communication acceleration and optimization
• Archival

"But one important note before embarking on this course to realize desired cost savings is to develop an architecture and implementation plan."