Seldom-accessed
unstructured data
clogs up your storage
infrastructure and drives
up costs. Now there’s a
solution that can give you
some breathing room
IT’S NO SECRET THAT STORAGE REQUIREMENTS ARE
GROWING AT A RAPID CLIP—roughly 30 percent to
50 percent a year for most organizations, according
to analyst estimates. What isn’t as well understood
is that a significant chunk of that growth comes from
inactive unstructured data—files that haven’t been
accessed in months or years yet nonetheless drive up
The Iron Mountain Virtual File Store team has found a new way
to squeeze more space out of existing storage infrastructure. From
left: Phil Gabardi, senior operations manager; Skip Gummow,
solution architect; Kathie Gerg, principal project manager; David
Gilon, product manager; Chris Schwarzer, principal engineer; and
Claire Lima, senior product marketing manager.
the overall costs of data storage.
Many organizations don’t fully grasp what those costs
are because they fail to consider all the contributing elements. Certainly there is the cost of storage hardware,
but also software, including any maintenance contracts,
as well as facilities charges, including data center real
estate, power and cooling. Network infrastructure and IT
staffing costs should also be taken into account.
When companies reduce the amount of inactive
unstructured data they have to manage, they likewise
reduce all those storage-related costs. And there’s a lot
of inactive data out there that’s ripe for savings, as companies tend to keep data because they never know what
they may one day be asked to produce as part of a lawsuit
or to meet regulatory requirements.
Now there is a new option for reducing the costs
and risks associated with inactive unstructured data:
offloading it to remote Iron Mountain servers. Iron
Mountain Digital’s Virtual File Store service reduces the
strain on in-house storage infrastructure while preserving access to the data and even providing an additional
layer of protection, since Iron Mountain maintains copies of all stored data in data centers located in different
disaster zones.
The scope of the problem
Inactive unstructured data may be chewing up more
storage capacity than IT executives realize. Unstructured
data includes data stored in documents, email, logs,
images, media files, CAD records, voice recordings, and
anything else that cannot be easily read and understood
by a computer, as records in a structured database can. In
a survey of more than 100 IT executives by IDG Research
Services, 61 percent said managing unstructured data
was either a high or critical priority.
The survey respondents also said that about 44 percent of their data was unstructured and that 37 percent
of that data was inactive.
Storage drivers
Companies keep data for three main reasons: to be prepared in the event of litigation, for regulatory compliance
purposes, and because they simply don’t know what they
can safely get rid of.
The revised Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that took
effect in December 2006 dramatically changed the landscape in terms of litigation and what data was subject
