What seems to be the problem? The book The Long Tail by Chris Anderson examines the economics of abundance versus scarcity. It does this by showing that not only are the high-volume "hits" end of a traditional demand curve important, but so are the "misses" (or niches) of the seemingly-endless long tail of that demand curve important. We are conditioned to a world where "hits" are dominant and "misses" or "niches" are rendered unprofitable, impotent or non-existent. The bestseller list for books, the top forty for songs, and the top movies/videos lists are example of "hits." Yet Amazon, Netflix, and many others have done very well by selling to the long tail of the curve where now it is profitable to sell even low volume products -- what retail stores would not stock as unprofitable "niches" or "misses.".



That is all very nice you say, but how does that apply to storage? If your organization is typical, you are continuing to accumulate data in unprecedented quantities. From a storage perspective you must worry about how to house all this data, but from a business perspective you want to make sense out of this data so that greater business value can be extracted from it. You are now trying to manage the economics of abundance of both data and storage rather than the scarcity of data and storage. That is not easy since while the cost (and therefore relative scarcity) of storage is now relatively low, the cost for managing it is relatively high. After all, would it be worth your while to spend an hour saving 10G-bytes of storage?

Although the fit may not be a perfect one, we can apply the principles of the Long Tail to storage. Hopefully, that will be one way to help you better understand how the world of data is changing. That can lead to a better understanding of what you must do.

What do you need to know? We have become so mesmerized by the data "hits" such as current open orders, the unread e-mail in the inbox, work on a new word processing document or presentation, or a collaborative project that we ignore the data "niches" of fixed content data that actually makes up the bulk of the useful data in the enterprise. Niches in this case simply mean data that is less frequently accessed or used for a different purpose than the original one for which it was created or acquired. For example, an open order is part of the revenue-producing order fulfillment process so it is a "hit." A closed order "niche" does not represent additional revenue, but it may represent a product that is under warranty to be supported by a support organization, a record that has to be kept for financial reconciliation purposes, and a data "atom" to be sent to a data warehousing or business intelligence application for supply chain planning or customer up-selling or cross-selling.



The first age of computer-based information

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