Today’s Thought: Disk is cheap but it’s not free

Disk is cheap but it’s not free.

With increased disk space comes increased responsibility to use it wisely. Additional expenses incur, particularly for backup, replication, and maintenance. Inexpensive disk drives cost more than the purchase price.

It’s a paradox in that when increasing the size of our databases, the value only occurs when we reduce all that raw data to information. The revelations needed to identify and provide more value to your organization only become apparent through reduction, the IT equivalent of chiseling Michelangelo’s Pietta out of a block of marble.

Value only comes through subtraction, not addition. Isolation of key facts, analysis, notification, and sculpting the data to your organizational needs are what really put you over the top, not just data point accumulation.

So it might be helpful to ask two questions the next time you need to ask disk to a server:

• What don’t we need any more on this server?
• What will we do with the additional information this new disk provides?

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