Data About Data

Global Data Vault now stores more data than all of the volumes in the Library of Congress. We actually passed that mark – 15TB – a long time ago. In fact this month alone, we added much more new storage than 15TB.

So, are our customers so prolific in their generation of data that they could fill the library of Congress many times over? Not exactly. So what gives?

Data about data. That may sound strange, but consider this example. I examined a typical email message in my inbox. The content of the email, including the signature block and all the spaces between words consisted of 573 characters. When then saved as an Outlook message on my desktop, the file is 24,576 bytes. That’s almost 50 times larger than the content of the message.

The overhead comes from all the other things required in an email. A partial list of these being the formatting information like fonts and colors, the tracking and routing information, and the structural context information which is needed to allow the message to be accessible to Exchange and to Outlook.

In this case, the ratio of information, the actual message, to data is 2%. In other cases, it is even smaller. And the trend, as our systems become even more sophisticated in capability is to store ever more data about data.