Another NetApp Insight technical conference is in the books, and what an amazing few days we enjoyed meeting with thousands of our industry colleagues!  Thanks to everyone who stopped by to see our cloud-based archiving solution, the E-Tiering Cloud Appliance (ETCA).  ETCA provides an easy, plug-and-play solution to help you organize your inactive files for on-premise or cloud-based archiving.  In fact, “The King” himself even stopped by for a demo of the new solution (only in Vegas!).  

Quota is defined as “a share or proportional part of a total belonging to a particular person or group.” Depending on your perspective, file data quotas can elicit a positive or a negative connotation. For IT administrators, quotas are a valuable tool meant to control the growth of unstructured data (find out the 6 easy ways). But from a user perspective, file quotas can be perceived as an evil force meant to control their behavior.

It’s that time of year when college campuses are overrun with new students and their laptops and other devices ― a new school year has begun!  But for many college IT departments, the question soon becomes how to manage this increase in file data?  What is the right solution for understanding files and managing data storage?  Today on Storage Insights, we’re conducting a back-to-basics course entitled, “How to Manage File Data,” featuring lessons learned from the Arts and Sciences Department of Concordia University. 

Data analysis tools – what value do they bring anyway? 

You probably know the industry statistic that 80% of data is never used again once it’s stored. Many times this stored data is actually irrelevant to your business, or duplicate content, or in a worst-case scenario, may even pose a risk to your company. Yet these low-value files are occupying the same storage space as the critical files you refer to daily — and costing you just as much to access. How can you begin to search the (potentially hundreds of millions) of stored files to begin purging the unnecessary ones? 

In quantity, file data (unstructured data) has been around now for roughly 50 years. Over the last 10 years, as graphic and media content moved into corporate files, most organization’s collection of file data has grown from large to massive – and it will only continue to grow… Millions of files will become billions of files. Terabytes will become petabytes. 

Do you remember a time when you came into a class and you were the only one who did the reading? It feels pretty good to have that leg up on everyone else. And you were probably the teacher’s favorite that day, too.

When you think about huge, high-level IT concerns, your first thought is unlikely the lowly file. You know: a word document or an mp3. Why would you jump there first? Actually, because unstructured data (i.e. files) and storage tiering is the largest area of data growth on the planet right now.

There’s a story I’ve heard told more than once: it’s the story of a man who lived across the street from a friend. Every day, this man would roll out a beautiful, vintage Rambler, every surface gleaming, white-walls and all.

Well, the thing of it is, every day he would roll out the car, but not to take it for a cruise. He would pull it out of the garage and into the driveway. There, he’d lovingly wash and wax it. And not just a quick rinse, this guy would spend an hour and a half, every single day, just washing a car he never used. Can you imagine?