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.

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

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.

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?