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Dell Says 90% of Recorded Business Data Is Never Read
Barence writes "According to a Dell briefing given to PC Pro, 90% of company data is written once and never read again. If Dell's observation about dead weight is right, then it could easily turn out that splitting your data between live and old, fast and slow, work-in-progress versus archive, will become the dominant way to price and specify your servers and network architectures in the future. 'The only remaining question will then be: why on earth did we squander so much money by not thinking this way until now?'" As the writer points out, the "90 percent" figure is ambiguous, to put it lightly.
People always bitch that they have to pay for Microsoft (or whatver) Office's features because they only use 5% of its functionality. But you buy all those features at once because you don't know which you will need in the future. Data warehousing is the same way. If you start taking data offline you'll just need that data. That's why analyses of very large data sets are performed before archiving.
But what is really wanted is a way to cluster the database servers, with old data automatically cycled to the slowest, most remote nodes, and with the most frequently-altered data heavily replicated and aggressively synchronized.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I worked in a call center, and I can definitely believe that 90% of the data is never read again. However, when a customer is calling back (and is angry!), you don't have time on a live call to wait to see what's up with the account. Also there can be some litigious aspects, and a lot of information was recorded for C.Y.A. purposes. Again, you never know which part is needed for C.Y.A. purposes, but that 10% sure is valuable.
So yeah, we needed to store ALL the account information, and we needed fast access to ALL of it ALL the time.