Keeping Data Forever

David Ferris had an interesting post the other day hinting of keeping all data forever. (Here) At Procedo, this is something that we're seeing with our customers as well. Over the course of the past few years we have seen our average customer increase from 2-3 TB to well over 10TB.

Over the past two months we've also had two requests for quotes from customers that have over 1PB of archived content each. We also have many customers that ask if we can increase retention during a migration applying a new retention period to all legacy archived data.

What this trend is confirming for us is that customers are keeping more data, longer. Customers who 6 years ago applied a 3 year retention period to their data still have it and don't know if or when they may turn on expiry to purge the data.

Storage growth is going to continue to compound as the rate at which we are creating new data is increasing multi-fold and we're not purging the legacy data. At our current rate, we could start to see the 100TB archive as being normal for the good majority of our customers. Needless to say, our storage partners are starting to realize the archive market is going to be a major growth area for them in the next few years.