Data: For now and evermore? (Point/Counterpoint)

IT users' desires and business executives' priorities are often at odds. A corporate storage strategy traditionally emphasizes data protection (backup) in favor of performance. Employees increasingly use — or misuse — e-mail systems as evergreen, searchable databases, which is driving 61 percent of new storage purchases, according to the 2003 InfoWorld Storage Survey. The survey shows that users’ impatience is winning out in general: Respondents say that 67 percent of corporate data must be maintained online, whereas only 17 percent of data can be moved to offline archives. Yet however much users hate to wait for data to load from an optical library, chief technologists' budgets are too slim to store every bit of data ever generated for immediate access. Can a combination of technology and policy create a storage strategy that cost-effectively preserves data and satisfies users' need for speed?

Tom: I don't think we can bridge the gap between users’ impatience and IT’s business objectives yet. When I looked to see how I've used nearline and offline storage over the years, I found plenty of archived data in my storage unit, including stacks of Syquest and Bernoulli cartridges. I have a big box of hard drives — some labeled, some not — filled with archival data. I could throw dice to guess the OS, file system, and jumper settings needed to read from these drives if their motor lubricants hadn't turned to epoxy by now. I filled one five-device RAID array with a commercial video project, but the vendor that made the array is long gone and there is no driver for its controller card. I have one 12-inch data Laserdisc — I don't even know where to start with that.

I'm a zero-patience user, a poster boy for random access. I would have cheered if my employers’ IT departments decided to replace tapes with online media. I have tried every alternative to tape I could find, thinking more about how long the backup and restore processes take than how long the archive will last. And now I have lots of data I either can't recover or wouldn't invest the effort to recover. After years of experimenting with all kinds of media and fancy storage management schemes, now I stream everything I care about to DLT (digital linear tape). I have a sense of what I’ve lost, and I now believe durability trumps convenience in an archiving strategy.

P.J.: I can relate, Tom. I still have to salvage data from some single-sided, original-Mac-format disks that are old enough to buy cigarettes without getting carded. But we're not talking about obsessive data-retentive types like you and me — we're talking about corporate data that must be managed. That implies retiring obsolete data, and by extension, obsolete data formats.

I have nothing against tape, but I can see why it's not always a practical choice when a company has terabyte upon terabyte that's not all in the same place. Besides, when survey respondents report that more than two-thirds — 68 percent — of their data needs to be online for immediate access today (a figure that will cross 70 percent in the next year), that pretty much rules out tape-based storage.

Pull out of your silo and smell the coffee, dude. Disks and Gigabit Ethernet are so cheap today that there's no reason admins can't back up everything in sight. Face it, backup and disaster recovery are two of the three activities most likely to drive a company's decision to spend scarce cash on storage. Not that there's any reason to question why e-mail ranks before disasters, but after backup: The administrators complaining the loudest about users who store everything in e-mail are also the ones who don't use the tools in their e-mail servers to enforce an appropriate retention policy.