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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.
90% - just like the percentage of statistics that are made up on the spot.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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 ?
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.'"
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.
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
A perfect application for my patented write-only memory.
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.
this helps me to be a better employee. From now on I'll only save 25% of the data I acquire, because the odds are the other 75% would only be needed 7.5% of the time. In other words, 92.5% chance not likely to be needed at all.
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?
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.
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?
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.