Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Bytes and Donuts

A senior manager of a major company (offices in 30 countries around the world) has just asked me to re-send an email. "Our IT department said that our mailboxes were too full, so we had to delete all our emails".

So he did, as did, I assume, his brethren.

Leaving aside the question of "Who is running this company", I am staggered by the storage dilemma.

Three years ago I was involved with a similar story related to a Document Management System.

Fifteen years ago, delivering Windows Training I was asked about file deletions. At the time I calculated that a megabyte of disk storage was the same price of a Tim Bit. This web site http://www.littletechshoppe.com/ns1625/winchest.html bears me out.

Twenty cents. It was then cheaper to drive across town, buy a bigger hard drive and install it than to spend time wading through ZIP files to see if they could be deleted.

Prices have gone down. Tiger Direct advertises a terabyte external for about $100. Do the math.

And yes, I know that the IT servers demand higher quality, but then you also have volume purchasing clout which I don't, so we are still order-of-magnitude even.

Two years ago I attended a SUN Microsystems presentation hosted by NaSPA . A three tier system. I'll paraphrase it here, but for the real truth contact Sun.

Three levels of backup storage were introduced, which I will call LOCAL, SLOW and TAPE. A file being created (File, save/SaveAs) or modified a copy is made immediately to all three levels of backup. Thus within seconds of the file being written, it is backed up in three distinct places.

SUN surveys revealed that (paraphrase here!) 90% of files not accessed within three days were never accessed again.

So, the LOCAL drive being full, stale files were replaced with shortcut links to the copy on the SLOW drive. You want your backup copy? Chances are strong it is on the LOCAL, but if not, a trivial delay and you can have it from the SLOW.

So, the SLOW drive being full, stale files were replaced with shortcut links to the copy on the TAPE drive. You want your backup copy? Chances are strong it is on the SLOW, but if not, a trivial delay and you can have it from the TAPE.

I was so impressed that I came home that night and wrote a Windows version in Word VBA, creating three levels of storage on three separate hard drives (no tape!), and fabricated shortcuts to deleted files. It works.

So what's IT's problem with storage.

Of emails?

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