For many organizations, data is not only crossing into the hundreds of terabytes, but into the near-petabyte (PB) and multi-petabyte range. In a new survey sponsored by Oracle and conducted by Unisphere Research among members of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), "The Petabyte Challenge: 2011 IOUG Database Growth Survey," close to one out of 10 respondents report that the total amount of online (disk-resident) data they manage today - taking into account all clones, snapshots, replicas and backups - tops a petabyte.
In some cases, companies are compelled to preserve data for extended periods of time, e.g., to meet compliance requirements, and as a result, more data is being kept online for longer periods of time - which increases storage costs. In fact, 12% of respondents say they simply now hang on to all data "forever."
As data grows, the reflex reaction by most organizations is to buy and install more disk storage. Smart approaches are on the horizon, but still only prevalent among a minority of companies. Close to one-third of respondents say their organizations now embrace tiered storage strategies, and one out of five is putting information lifecycle strategies into place to better and more cost-effectively manage their data.
The executive summary of the research report is now freely available from the IOUG. IOUG members can log in to access the full results.