We all like BIGGER!
Amazing the rate of disk storage capacity changes isn’t it. Everyone loves greater capacity, right? Yeah of course we do, it means that we can get more stuff onto our gadgets. The same mindset is apparent in the Enterprise as well. We are seeing an abundance of high capacity disk systems growing at an exponential rate.
There has been a significant shift in the Enterprise Storage market in the last few years with some new vendors coming to market with an ever decreasing cost per TB. These days a pattern is emerging that disk just needs to be disk. The software layer above it will do all the funky stuff – backup, archiving, snapshot, replication etc.
Whether this be VMware or a third party, the tide is turning as storage vendors do not seem to be able to keep their software developed at a rate as to which the market demands.
Consumer Synergies
Going back to my situation then, personally (as a consumer), I have a number of backup and cloud solutions for my important data. Dropbox, OneDrive, Evernote a few USB drives kicking around and a few others depending on which day of the week and what promotion coupon I have managed to pick up. I have noticed that ultimately I have an abundance of duplications across my datasets. In a nutshell I have a lot of crap! As to what extent this is – I have no idea. Organisations share synergies with us, as consumers, although there are some distinct differences.
Companies still need to build strategy around their data and retention. Data and object count has a significant impact on disk storage sub systems, backup, replication, DR and compliance. All these impact the way the business runs on its infrastructure. The image in the blog post is prevalent. Although the cost of storage is generally getting cheaper, this maintains the attitude of allowing users to dump data freely.
The Risk
We do it in the consumer world and it sure happens in business as well. To have to sanitise this data is not a job for the faint-hearted system Admin. The object count in some situations is just too ridiculous. Also, the fear of delete or enforcing retention on this data is just too high. Disk is getting cheaper and, in conjunction with, the fear of deleting any data means that the “bucket of crap” is just getting bigger and bigger.
There will become a tipping point whereby the object count of unstructured and untapped dark data will mean that a certain amount of risk will appear for a business. As a System Admin, it is your job to find out what your data is doing – to ascertain mitigating any risk and allowing for the greatest efficiencies within your storage estate.
