Storage Devices (part 1)

1. Data that is being created and stored at is progressing at an insane pace every year compared to the previous years. The number of movie DVDs that are produced world wide is in billions. The images captured by world population on their cameras, handy cams, mobile cameras amount to tera bytes of data. The emails received in a day (or sent in a day) runs to 200 billion from about 1.3 billion email users including spam.
   
   Scary? It is easier to imagine this for a digital image consumer. On an average a photograph is seen 0.2 times in a person’s life time from some studies conducted so far. So, if a lay person captures on an average 20,000 photographs in his or her lifetime, he or she will actually view only about 4000 photographs. The rest are just stored and archived and migrated from disk to disk and converted from format to format until it becomes e-waste the next century.
   
   For corporations, it is even worse and a nightmare! While the data retention requirements are growing with so many compliances and regulatory requirements mandating that, the corporation also has to manage the costs associated with it and even bring it down while increasing storage. Nice problem to have, huh?
   
   Storage technologies have progressed greatly and are trying to solve the storage efficiency problem while security companies are getting to solve the issue of data protection, encryption and compliance management and Search Engine Optimization techniques are driving search and hence cost efficiencies.
   
   A simple method of knowing your cost drivers would be to collect survey results with following questions.
   
   How many employees store and retrieve documents over network as well as local disks?
   How many seconds or minutes per day does each employee spend searching for document (not searching for information)?
   How many seconds or minutes per day does each employee spend recreating documents that a quick search did not provide?
   How many seconds or minutes per day does each employee spend recreating documents because the original was deleted or is inaccessible to him or her?
   How many seconds or minutes per day does each employee spend trying to find the latest version of a document stored on local media or networked shares?
   
   
   This is just tip of the iceberg!