Are you about to spend even more money on storage? Have
a thorough clearout before you part with a chunk of your hard-won
budget, advises Jim Lee.
We humans love to hoard things, saving objects for
sentimental reasons or because they might be useful somewhere down
the road.
This inability to part with things has spilled over into our
computers. Buying computers with ever larger hard drives because we
fear purging our old documents, untimely spreadsheets and other
rarely accessed data.
Data hoarding has also become a way of life for businesses. Data
is needed to make business decisions, resolve customer complaints,
and comply with data retention mandates to avoid costly
penalties.
Before we know it, more storage must be purchased, searching
data takes forever and systems run slower. The Storage Networking
Industry Association (SNIA) of Europe reported in its annual
storage audit that a third of the respondents said their
requirements had grown by 100% or more in the previous 12
months.
We have all this data, all this information stuffed out there in
our multigigabyte file cabinets. All of it precious, all of it
needed forever, all of it valuable. But is it?
Over time, the value of data to an organisation changes. Not all
of it has to remain online, accessible in real time. Some of it is
no longer needed and should be deleted, not saved. A lot is
historical, you save it because you have to.
Businesses have adopted many strategies to deal with ballooning
volumes of data. Sometimes, just getting a bigger server and more
storage is the easiest solution. However, as time goes on, more
budget must be allocated for storage upgrades.
What is needed is a real cleaning of the closets. Data should be
analysed as to what is current, what is old but must be saved, and
what can be purged. Once the data is sorted, rarely accessed data
can be moved to an archive. Archiving, as a strategy, is a common
sense approach.
However, we now encounter the final problem in paring down our
data hoard: access to that archived data. For non-database files,
data access may not present a problem. Searching the archived data
could take time but the data returned would be accurate.
Relational databases are much more complex to archive. They have
relationships that must remain intact or else you risk losing the
business context of your data.
Active archiving, a proven strategy, provides the best solution
for housekeeping. Unlike traditional archiving, active archiving
culls data from relational databases, simultaneously capturing the
records to be archived, along with the database associations and
other essential metadata.
You can store archived data cost effectively, using the storage
medium of choice, while still retaining access to your archived
data, all relationships intact. Once archived, the rarely accessed
data can be removed. With a more manageable database size, system
performance improves immediately.
If you’re finding that you don’t have room to store another
byte, consider cleaning your database as your first option.
What do you think?
How do you deal with data hoarding?
Tell us in an e-mail
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Jim Lee is vice president of product
marketing at Princeton Softech. He will be speaking at Storage Expo
2003, which takes place at Olympia London from 15-16 October
2003.
www.storage-expo.com