Storing digital data is the prime objective of any data center; the question is for how long the data is going to be stored. Almost all of us are storing our digital data on an offsite data center by the means of emails, photos, videos etc. I always had this thought in my mind that for how long would our personal data be stored and preserved. Say, if after some 150 or 200 years our great (great) grand children want to access the information, do they have the option to do that? This is not a problem for just an individual, but it is also of importance for the data that belong to Government agencies and Big Institutions.
According to Strategic Research Findings, as of 2004, only a few Government agencies have set some storage specific requirements like “If data is stored on disk, it has to be migrated to a new disk drives every 3 years and if the data is stored on tape, it has to be migrated every 5 years etc.”. Now this kind of data management practice leaves us with two huge and urgent gaps that require attention. First, the current practice cannot preserve data reliably for the long term. Second, the explosion of the amount of information and data being kept long term make the cost and complexity of keeping digital information prohibitively high leave alone the cost involved in periodic migration.
Let’s analyze the above problem with simple example. Let’s say if a data center has 1.0 Peta byte of data today that it needs to store for 100 years. After 3 years it will have 1.50 PB of data assuming even a modest 10% annual growth rate. In the third year, for reliable and long term storage, it needs to migrate all of year one’s data to a new disk storage system. According to a press release by incipient, the average cost of migrating 1 Terabyte of data is about $5000. And a datacenter with 1 PB of storage under management spends $1.25 Million annually on data migration operations, assuming about 25% of data is migrated to new storage every year. And on top of that most of these data migrations are incredibly time consuming.
Now if we add parallel demands of migration , in a few years time, we would run out of time and money. Unless the datacenter is properly funded and equipped with sufficient workforce, this migration process for preserving data for 100s of years can’t be sustained. Organizations who understand this problem are now working on the so called ‘Information Life Cycle Management’ which involves following the best practices required for storing and managing data for life time.
Thousand years ago, people used Stylus and Papyrus for storing information which had its own disadvantages and because of that we were unable to retrieve all that information today. We just hope that the same problem does not happen after thousand years from now.
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