Analysis

posted on 03 July 2008 14:08

According to a USENIX presentation, 90% of data on NetApp's networked storage systems was untouched over a 3-month period, raising the issue of whether it would be better placed on cheaper storage.

The issue was reported in GCN. Computer science researcher Andrew Leung presented his findings at the USENIX meeting in Boston, Mass, last week. A research team looked at the access pattern for more than 22TB of data on NetApp's own networked storage. They detected CIFS packets used by NetApp users on Windows PCs.

The vast majority of the stored files were never touched once written to the storage, more than 90% of them. Of the opened files, 65% were accessed once with most of the remainder being opened five times or less.

These findings suggest to this writer that archiving such data to a spun-down MAID array or to optical storage might be a good idea. In other words, treat it as near-archive or actual archive data.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}