From PC Pro: ”According to Dell, 90% of company data is written once and never read again. This arresting claim cropped up in the middle of a presentation from Dell’s Enterprise division, recently given to Jon Honeyball and me. Given our usual style of dealing with such events, the poor devils didn’t stand a chance of actually working though their prepared order of slides, and I’d have to confess that we didn’t even try to stick to the script we’d discussed in the run-up to the meeting.
But even allowing for our natural tendency towards anarchy, this statement stood right out from the other stuff in the presentation. It’s an odd statistic. How is that data measured? 90% of all documents? 90% of stored bytes? When they said “ever again” did they mean explicitly retrieved by name, or should we include free text searches in that statistic? How long an interval needs to pass before some piece of data is clearly identified as belonging to the 90%, so that steps can be taken to reflect its reduced importance? These questions are just the starting point for an issue that demands quite a lot of thinking. It’s a fascinating finding to be offered to you by a vendor of servers, given that so few of the devices they try to sell to smaller organisations actually reflect this “fact” in their hardware and software specification.”
