No, I’m not referring to the waste basket although it is related to an important aspect of information management, which is dealing with information after it’s been produced and processed. In the days when the bulk of information lived in hard copy form, its visibility and the amount of physical space it occupied made managing it a high priority. As the document stacks in one’s office began to get too high, people would routinely reorganize and clean out by filing a lot of it in the circular file cabinet (waste basket). Often it was the information that was rarely if ever used and the need for organization and space outweighed its perceived importance even though it was originally kept for a reason.
As the PC appeared on the desktop, the amount of information being kept became invisible for the most part. The circular file cabinet became the hard disk drive, which made it easier to store more stuff without the physical clutter. However, it has also created a problem that still needs to be resolved as it relates to knowing what’s being stored, its importance and whether it even needs to be retained. Some would say that the disk file system has replaced the physical filing systems and made managing files easier. However, the traditional file system is rather opaque. It provides a static, two-dimensional view of the data on disk without any context that is needed to effectively manage information.
In the early days when directory names were limited to eight characters and file names to eight characters and a three-character extension we had to employ significant position coding schemes to provide some information about the file. Then we got long file names that people thought would help enable more meaningful file naming, thus better management. What we’ve wound up with is a folder, sub-folder, file name structure where often the only context for the information exists with the user that created it and the folder hierarchy. After a short time even the end user can start to lose context for the information on their own hard drive especially if they’re not actively accessing the files.
Now it really gets complex when you get to the data center providing shared storage for hundreds or thousands of end users. The storage administrators are simply managing devices and have little, if any, context for the information contained in files or its business value. File systems with thousands of folders/sub-folders and tens of thousands of files just look like a bunch of stuff, clutter. As the volume of file-based data continues to explode and capacities to store this information grow to Petabytes, there is a major need to enable more descriptive information (metadata), context, to be stored with each file. It’s not that file systems don’t have a place in the data center, it’s that as the repositories grow and information is retained for longer periods another dimension is required to enable more intelligent data management.
The information contained in that circular file cabinet (spinning disk) is what’s most important and the ability to persist context with it will vastly improve management for the near and long-term. Object-based storage is emerging as a new category of storage technology that expands the capacity of metadata and adds an intelligent management dimension to storage based on content. Its features and functionality make it the right choice for archiving and cloud storage infrastructure.
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