April 18, 2007

I have yet to meet an IT manager who doesn't complain about having to manage too much data. Many, it seems, feel that accumulating data has become something like the weather -- everyone talks about it, but apparently there's just not a whole lot anybody can actually do.

The superabundance of data in corporate data centers results from many things, including:

• Substantial growth in the use of rich media (video on demand movies, for example)
  
• The digitizing of analog data to make it more rapidly and usefully accessible(making x-rays part of a patient's online medical records)
  
• The use of mirrored disks, clones and replicated volumes as part of corporate data
  protection schemes.

There are less valid reasons behind data buildup, like keeping the accounting department's football pool on corporate storage and the fact that stored data, whatever its irrelevance or lack of value, never seems to get discarded. Once things get stored, they tend to stay stored forever, and forever is a very long time. You can solve some aspects of the problem through technology, such as using data deduplication.

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