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By Susan
Marks
Network World,
12/24/01
[Back to Trash talk over data disposal]
Data disposal at some companies means removing files from
front-line networks to subsequent storage environments and eventual long-term
archiving in perpetuity. At others, disposal means a series of preset storage-area network options that end with data destruction.
Bob Zimmerman, director of storage research at Giga Information
Group, advocates long-term data storage. Keeping data around is just an expense.
Losing the data is sometimes disastrous, he says.
To back up his point, Zimmerman recalls the case of a
senior engineer working on seismic data for an oil company. The engineer took
a lengthy sabbatical and returned to find all his data gone. It seems
that he was not familiar with the IT department's process of deleting data
after 18 months. "So there are upsides and downsides to data disposal," he adds.
"I never recommend blowing the data away. I
think it is always cheaper to dump it on a tape and send it off to a salt
mine, [because] if you ever have to recover some of the stuff that you inadvertently
or purposely threw away, recreating it is going to cost you more than you
ever saved in all of the throwaways that you made," Zimmerman says.
But Pat Tagtow, senior counsel for BMC Software, questions
the wisdom of archiving data for indefinite periods of time. "You may
be in a little more organized fashion, but you're not managing in a prudent
manner. The concept of the information management program is that you are
going to have a manageable amount of information and when you destroy data
or when something is no longer needed, it's gone so you don't have to manage
it any longer."
Roger Craycraft, CIO of Ashland, a chemical and petroleum
company in Covington, Ky., agrees. When a retention period ends at Ashland,
the data is eliminated. "I don't think we want to necessarily [even]
be in a position to recover it," he says.
Whatever the final policy, to avoid confrontation with
users, initially implement the system so the data is removed from the
disk but backed up so it can be recovered, recommends Pete Lindstrom,
an analyst with Hurwitz Group.
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