Bite the Bullet and Throw Away Your Data

By Ashish Nadkarni

E-Commerce Times 
June 03, 2009 

There’s only one way to keep data storage costs under control, and that’s to get rid of unnecessary data. That may go against the grain of IT managers who rightly consider backup and preservation as critical to an organization’s health, but when it comes to data storage, there are ways to separate what’s useful from what’s disposable.

It should come as no surprise to any IT manager that your organization’s appetite for data keeps growing every minute. No sooner than a new set of storage tools is deployed, it becomes clear there’s a need for more, and you start planning the next wave of hardware purchases. More hardware means more floor space, power and cooling — it’s a vicious circle.

The total amount of disk storage shipped last year grew 40.5 percent from 2007, according to a recent study by IDC. If you imagine that this appetite for consumption is going to be questioned at some point in the interest of trying to curtail the IT carbon footprint, then you are not alone. Of course, there is no smoking gun, but there are choices you can make to get rid of unwanted data and free up space. That precious space can then be utilized for other purposes, thereby limiting the amount of new storage capacity to be purchased.

Before getting into “slice and dice” mode, it’s important to define what, exactly, is the goal? The goal is to ensure that spinning disk, i.e., online disk storage, is used for storing data that is really valuable to the organization. Any data that is not — and it could be in any shape or form — needs to be appropriately disposed of. Disposal could mean simply deleting it, or it could mean archiving it in another medium, either a magnetic medium such as tape, or an optical medium such as DVD or CD ROM.

Low-Hanging Fruit

What kind of data can be disposed of? Most often, the kind of data that is “time classified” or unstructured …

Please click here to continue reading this article