I’m starting to think I might be a bit of a data hoarder. I might add it to my list of potential new year’s resolutions.
The big question every IT manager has to ask him or herself is: what am I backing up? Chances are, they are backing up the same data — email messages that have been loitering in mailboxes for months, sales transactions from weeks ago, patient records that haven’t been purged, performance reviews from last year — over and over again. Whatever was in the database and got backed up yesterday got backed up again today and will get backed up again tomorrow and forever more until it’s not in the database anymore.
I’ve worked for Dell for over 10 years. I’m not going to share how many email messages I’ve hung onto “just in case” or how many performance reviews I’ve squirreled away on the off chance I need them for some strange reason (I realize most likely nobody is going to ask me for my 2005 performance review ;) but just in case, I could produce it quickly!), or how many huge graphics files I have from product launches of long ago… (I really hope nobody from our IT department is reading this.) I don’t hoard physical things, but files and data are out of sight so how could that be considered hoarding?
I have realized that if I am a data hoarder, then there are probably a lot of other people doing this too. And across any organization, that’s a lot of email and graphics files piling up and being backed up over and over. I did a quick search and found an Email Statistics Report from the Radicati Group which shows that this year, business users send and receive on average 121 emails a day (and of course that’s expected to grow to 140 emails a day in 2018…can’t wait). And that’s just email. That doesn’t even get into all of the social media videos and graphics.
Seems almost all of the customers we talk to are trying to do things better, faster, more efficiently, at lower cost or just plain smarter in some way or another. We’re focused on finding ways to do things smarter within backup and recovery. We’re looking for ways to help our customers spend less money, take back time that’s being swallowed up in something it doesn’t need to be, and move more quickly in the crazy fast business world we’re all in. We’re finding ways to design technology to improve the way data protection is done. It sounds a little hokey but it’s true.
Purpose built appliances are a great example of that. Think about it…you probably have some data hoarders within your organization. But you know you can improve your ROI by shrinking your footprint on secondary storage and data deduplication is a good way to do just that. Using up to 93% less storage space with a cost as low as $0.17/Gb can definitely help you spend less money. We’ve had customers tell us that it freed them up to do more in their environments. Add the fact that appliances are turnkey solutions and that means less dollars, less footprint, and just less of a burden on the day to day operations.
Hmmm, just got another “your inbox is almost full”…when will IT fix that?
Next steps: Learn more about dedupe and appliances.
