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Where Are You Going To Put Your Growing Data?

According to IDC Research, 90% of the data in the world has been created in the last two years. Peter Sweeney- Waterford

According to IDC Research, 90% of the data in the world has been created in the last two years.

Peter Sweeney- Waterford Technologies

As a non IT related manager or director in a company you may wonder how that impacts on you.  It’s just a number after all.  But suppose two years ago there were a given number of public libraries in the world and they had to manage an increase in the number of books on the shelves by a factor of 90% as of today.

What are the options?  Build an extension?  Build a new library? Throw the older books away?

The reality is that building a new library takes time and a vast amount of planning and money.  Even building an extension takes time and what form should it take?  Just big enough or vast enough to cope with huge future expansion?  The other option would be to look at the books themselves.  Some books have never been read. Some are more than 7 years old and some have only been read once in a long time.  Some books are vast encyclopaedias and take up lots of shelf space and go out of date quickly.  But, all of the books are ordered in subjects or areas of interest, not in age or size. Without opening every one and looking at how old it is and who read it, how can you select them?  And what if one person wants a book that has been thrown away in the process?  How can it be recovered?  And once you’ve done it, more new books are arriving next month. You have to do it again.

Going back to the opening line, the analogy of the library holds good for every IT manager and Director in the world.  It is just the terminology that changes slightly.  How do you manage File Archiving and the vast influx of new files on your computer network.

  1. Build a new computer network and storage to cope with your files?  The cost analogy holds good.  This is expensive and the rate of data expansion can be exponential.
  2. Build an extension?  Adding storage space can be done, but in what form and where does it end?  How big should it be. Will we need more next month?
  3. Identify and throw out the old files.  Who is going to do this? How long will it take?  What if they are needed?  The files are all over the place and not in a neat structure. Maybe even across several companies. The cost is vast in man hours.

The reality is that unless some form of automated File Archiving is in place, in the next few years, IT storage costs are likely to grow exponentially with your data and become a serious cost issue.

What you need to do is to identify a solution that can:

  • Report – easily view your files by server, by owner, by size, by type, by name, by age, etc.
  • Delete – clean up your file servers and purge old and unneeded and duplicate files from the detailed reports.
  • Archive – Protect files by copying them to the archive server. Move older versions of files to the archive and compress them, saving huge amounts of network space.
  • Stub – Remove older files from file servers and replace them with an intelligent “stub” that automatically retrieves the original file from the archive. It’s equivalent to putting a thin piece of paper on a shelf in a library showing where the original heavy encyclopaedia is located outside the library and allowing the user to have it brought to them automatically if they ever need it.

So, if you have an IT network, you hear what’s happening to big data and you want to keep your costs in check, talk to us.