Expanding Role Of Data Deduplication
Posted by
Behzad Behtash
May 25, 2010
Applying a tiered strategy lets IT migrate older and less frequently accessed data to lower-cost storage--and in doing so significantly reduces both the growth rate of pricey Tier 1 capacity and overall data center costs. Sounds like a no-brainer, but data classification and planning are essential--including developing policies around retention, appropriate storage architecture, data backup and recovery, growth forecasting and management, and budgeting.
Policy is one area where many are falling behind. For example, one of the most eye-opening results of our survey was the response to our query about data retention periods. The percentage of participants reporting indefinite retention for application data ranged from 30% for Web (wikis and blogs) to a whopping 55% for enterprise database and data warehouse applications. And with the exception of wiki and blog applications and rich media, 50% or more of respondents report at least a five-year retention period--as high as 76% for enterprise databases and data warehouses.
We're clearly struggling to keep up with the complex records management needed to comply with requirements such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, related privacy rules, and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, just to name a few of the regs bedeviling enterprise IT.
We were also surprised to see that Tier 2 storage growth rates reported by our survey participants weren't dramatically different from Tier 1 growth rates. Twenty-nine percent of respondents reported growth in excess of 25% for Tier 2 storage, compared with 18% for Tier 1, and nearly twice the number of respondents are seeing growth rates of 51% to 75% in Tier 2 storage.
This represents a golden opportunity for IT to adopt more aggressive life-cycle management and shift more growth onto less costly Tier 2 storage. It may also indicate that more automation is needed. To that end, consider deploying information life-cycle management tools or archival systems with automated tiering features. More on those in our full report.
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