Storage Tip: Know your data types

By David Hill, Mesabi Group

Knowing your blood type is important for people; knowing your data types is important for IT. Decisions on how you protect your data, how you go about archiving it, and how you can best organize the data not only for its current uses, but also how to get more out of it (such as search) depend upon your understanding the data type. Yet IT organizations tend to lump data into only two types -- structured and unstructured. That is wrong. Those ordered bits we call data can come in three general types -- structured, semi-structured, and unstructured. Understanding the difference among these three types is necessary because the storage administration for each of the three types differs.

Read the full tip here.