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Dell Says 90% of Recorded Business Data Is Never Read

Posted by timothy on from the sounds-lowball-no-matter-the-methodology dept.

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.

2 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. This is new? by rapturizer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I saw this over a decade ago when I was working as an IT consultant in the advertising industry. They regularly used only 5% - 10% of their information (and that's being generous). The systems I designed included a server for active work, an archive server for information used in the last 24 months, and then an archive solution (Magneto Optical at the time) that allowed for the information to be available, just not on demand. This idea has been working since for the clients that are still in business.

  2. Solutions: by drolli · · Score: 5, Interesting

    a) Forbid *unmanaged* of documents. If the question: "where is the most up-to-date version of this document stored?" is systematically and easily answered then people can delete the crap from their laptops.

    b) Forbid in-company attachments to mails. If the last version can be easily found, including the revision history, a link to this revision is worth *more* than the current state of the document. Most space in my inbox are totally useless attached documents.

    c) Forbid the use of formats unsuitable for storing a certain kind of information. (Where i work, they use powerpoint/word files for electronics forms)

    d) Provide a good archiving and backup service. Besides the quality improvement by using a service, also the 100th copy done in some unsystematic way of some data is prevented (forbid this explicitely)

    e) Thin clients. store the data on a server. Deduplicate.

    f) i would expect that most of the documents in a company can (and should) be stored in a database.