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.

Comments

Which 90% ?

[mbone]

I could believe the 90% number. There is plenty of data sitting around in case it is needed. Some of it will be needed. Much of won't be. How do you predict which is which ?

Re:Which 90% ?

[eldavojohn]

I could believe the 90% number. There is plenty of data sitting around in case it is needed. Some of it will be needed. Much of won't be. How do you predict which is which ?

Yeah, as someone who has implemented a few auditing solutions where I work, I must confess that it seems to be 99% of the data we archive is never looked at again. A lot of it is due to policies and is only used after something goes dreadfully wrong. If they are well thought out, the metrics can be collected as the data is written instead of needing to search across the data.

I think their "90% dead-weight rule" is really a misnomer as you could probably claim that 90% of Google's indexing is never read but we all know that it's the potential that data holds that makes it so valuable and necessary. If Google knew every future possible search then they could delete the data they will never use ... but how do they know they will never use it? How do I know that the auditing data will never have a use--by new metric or incident investigation? The truth is simply that you don't.

Re:Which 90% ?

[Mspangler]

Note that I'm working from a process control perspective in a chemical plant, but 90% of data written is never read again sounds about right for when things are going well. It's when something goes wrong and you have to figure out what went wrong at exactly what time and what the regulatory consequences were that having all that previously unread data suddenly becomes very interesting indeed.

And also when you start looking at a system in detail to see if you can increase output, or change a composition, all that usually ignored data becomes very valuable.

which 90%

[marmusa]

Which 90% though? Like the Coca Cola exec who remarked that he was pretty sure half of his advertising budget was wasted, he just wasn't sure which half.

The problem is "Write-only" applications

[shoppa]

Interesting that this seems to have been written up as a "hardware" or "storage" topic.

The problem is, that IT people dream up all these "write only" applications that record data, without any rational plan for what the data might actually be used for in the business.

For example, some people worry about privacy when they go to the grocery store and know that all their purchases are being tracked by their loyalty card, or worry that the big bad US government is tapping all the E-mail.

In fact, I'm 100% sure that some IT geek had some wet dream years ago about recording everybody's purchases and E-mail and phone call and it's being done every which way.;

The true "IT application" issue is that there is no real business need for this data 99.999% of the time. It gets recorded, probably gets staged off to tape, maybe indexed in some giant table, and then ... sits there for years with no actual need for it.

I'm sure the IT geeks who dreamed up the technical ability to record all this stuff, thought they were hot shit when they came up with it. Oh, man, those IT architects were just having a big go-round whipping this problem in scalability. In their heads, they were gonna record everything on disk, then go home and fuck the prom queen.

Re:The problem is "Write-only" applications

[mikael_j]

The problem is, that IT people dream up all these "write only" applications that record data, without any rational plan for what the data might actually be used for in the business.

These plans mostly come into being because us "IT people" (read: developers) know that the "business people" love changing the specs and they'll blame us if they want to start using data they didn't ask us to save and we tell them we can't save data retroactively (really, they'll basically blame the developers for not being able to time-travel). This is why we'd rather save everything than not save enough.

This isn't a 'new way of thinking'

[sirwired]

Automated Hierarchical Storage Management has literally been around for decades. It may be new-ish on low-end crap x86 servers, but for say, mainframe users, it isn't new at all.

What is new is available implementation choices. When your tier choices are between enterprise disk and enterprise tape, you are biased towards keeping data on disk; there's still use cases for HSM with only high-end disk and tape, but they aren't as great. Now with lower-cost disk available, you have a cheap disk choice too, with fairly reasonable access time.

SirWired

dell's new line of fire extinguishers coming soon!

[drfireman]

Over 92% of fire extinguishers will never be used, we could probably save a bit of space by having the unneeded ones stored off-site, or in less accessible corners of the garage.

Slightly more seriously, we can certainly answer this question posed by the linked article easily: "why on earth did we squander so much money by not thinking this way until now?" The answer is: because you are a moron. Anyone who has given even a moment's thought to storage has known this, either implicitly or explicitly, for a long time. So whoever's included in your "we," Steve Cassidy, is just profoundly stupid. I think that quite easily explains why you all squandered so much money by not thinking about this. Next question?

So what?

[davidbrit2]

And if you didn't have that 10% that is eventually needed, you'd be totally screwed. Do we really need to play the 20/20 hindsight game every time somebody thinks of something like this?

Exactly.

[brusk]

I wasted money on a dictionary that has tens of thousands of words but have only ever looked up a few hundred. I should have bought one that just had the words I would actually need.

Re:Coincidence?

[hairyfeet]

Probably SOX and other data required for CYA. I have set up small business networks for quite a few businesses, and while I don't know about 90% I'd say a good 70% of the data they had me set up backup solutions for was stuff they would never break out unless a CYA situation came up like an IRS audit. The simple fact is you have to keep a LOT of stuff to CYA nowadays, and most of that stuff won't be used in any other situation.

So while I'm not sure about the 90% part at least from my own experience I can believe 70-80% easy. With the possibility of lawsuits (both you suing them for unpaid bills or them suing you because they decide they don't like the work) IRS audits, SOX, there is a whole lot of data that unless a specific set of circumstances come up will be WORN. That is just a part of doing business in the digital age.