The study found that many companies have no clear digital retention policy, and, as a result, end up saving almost everything forever.

The result is an exponential growth of saved data and a corresponding rise in expense in storage media and data management overhead.

The key is developing data deletion policies that allow your company to delete unneeded data at regular intervals without running afoul of the law. According to Symantec, less than half of the corporations surveyed had any such policies in place.

According to the survey’s authors, the cost of storage is one factor, but the cost of retrieving data grows even faster. Many companies still us tape backup as an archiving system, a procedure that leads to enormous overhead costs for retrieval.

The key recommendations of the survey include:

1. Setting up a comprehensive archiving system
2. Distinguishing between backups (data dumps for retaining data from a system crash) and archives (which should be automatically structured, indexed and easy to search), and
3. Developing and enforcing an information retention policy that spells out what data is permanent and what can and must be deleted at regular intervals.

IBM and Fujifilm announced that their researchers have come up with technology that increases the density of data on tape by a factor of 40 times more than tape that is commonly used now. The new technology will allow 35 terabytes of storage on one tape. (A terabyte is 1,024 gigabytes.)

The companies managed to radically revise three factors: the ability to lay more tracks on each inch of tape, an improvement in the ability to accurately read smaller magnetic particles, and an improved low read-write head.

Tape has advantages over hard disk storage in two main areas:

• cost (tape costs about a tenth of hard disk space), and
• energy consumption (up to 300 times less than disks).

The latter is a big factor for many data centers, as power costs mount steadily.

The technology is not yet an available product, but it should give encouragement to those already using tape that there is a future for them, and it might give an plausible alternative for companies being hit by escalating power costs.

Despite all the marketing hoopla, a new survey says businesses aren’t lining up to ink deals with cloud storage vendors. Their main concern: data security.

Vendors have pushed cloud storage as a solution to help IT departments in a tight economy — storage needs are growing by about 30% to 40% a year, according to most estimates, while budgets are staying flat.

But just 3% of companies have implemented cloud storage, according to a recent survey by Forrester. And most companies have no plans to start.

Forrester polled 1,272 IT decision makers at small- to mid-sized businesses. When asked about their plans for cloud computing:

• 43% said they aren’t interested in cloud storage
• another 43% said they’re interested, but have no plans to adopt
• 3% plan to adopt cloud storage this year
• 5% plan to do so a year from now or later
• 3% have already implemented cloud storage, and
• 1% are expanding an existing implementation.

The biggest reason for the reluctance: security and privacy concerns, according to 51% of IT execs. Businesses don’t want important data on another company’s servers.

There are also worries that information will be lost. In 2008 and 2009, two online storage providers, The Linkup and Carbonite,  made the news when they lost data and couldn’t recover it for some customers.

Does this mean businesses will continue to shy away from cloud computing? Not necessarily, say most experts, as cloud vendors are getting better and IT’s needs are increasing.

To ensure security when putting data in the cloud, Gartner recommends businesses:

1. Evaluate the vendor’s security practices
2. Make sure your contract demands regular security checks and immediate notification of any security issues
3. Find out how the vendor protects against insider theft (for example, review employee background check policies), and
4. Know what other businesses use the same vendor — they may bring added risk to the network.

Has your organization considered moving to cloud storage? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments section below.

As the world becomes ever more dependent on the availability of centrally stored data, the chance of something going wrong keeps growing. And, even the savviest companies are vulnerable.

You can find the list, complied by Data Center Knowledge, here.

The article gives the gory details. Among the companies affected are some of the biggest names in the tech industry: Google, Amazon, IBM, PayPal, Twitter, T-Mobile, Sprint. Among the causes: fire, power outages, Tweet explosions, and, of course, the death of Michael Jackson, a phenomenon that brought news sites to their knees.

It’s a good reminder that just as the biggest and savviest companies can have problems, small companies should also plan for the worst.

Researchers at Google published a paper not long ago that showed servers failing at a much higher rate at 59 degrees than at 122.

The paper’s authors used data from more than 100,000 SATA and PATA drives with 80-400 GB capacities.

While Google’s data centers dwarf those of the average small or mid-size firm, the company’s using servers similar in size and type, shunning the pricey RAID-class disks.

To read an abstract of the Google research paper or to download a PDF of the whole study, click here.

Super Talent Technology has announced the December launch of the first flash drives to use USB 3.0. No price yet, but it’s likely to be steep, at least at first.

USB 3.0 is capable of transfer rates up to 4.8 Gbit/sec — 10 times faster than current USB 2.0 drives.

The drives are available in 32, 62 and 128GB capacities, and will be backward compatible with USB 2.0. That capacity is almost in line with the USB 2.0 flash drives on the market, where Toshiba has just announced the first 512GB version.

Who needs them? The combination of high capacity and lightning speed may make these a godsend for those two have to transfer huge gobs of information from one system to another (think video).

These are among the first USB 3.0-compatible products to be announced, with expected to come in 2010. One word of warning – you won’t get the full speed unless you have a USB 3.0 port on your computer, something that’s not yet on the market, though it should be by early next year.

Most of your peers, vendors and customers are doing it.

The push for paperless recordkeeping is well under way — you’ve probably noticed banks asking customers to opt out of paper statements. But momentum is expected to ramp up within the year.

Reason: 92% of 300 companies surveyed say they’ll start a program to switch all customers to an electronic system within the next 12 months, according to the Green IT & Sustainability Survey 2009 by consulting group IDC.

As you can guess, the main driver is cutting costs — but attempts to enhance the company’s green reputation are also playing a role. Of the companies who’ll switch to paperless records, 64% said it’s because of costs, while 46% said sustainability was the primary reason.

You can purchase the report here. The 15-page slide presentation goes for $500.

When DVDs came on the market in the mid-1990s, it wasn’t just the movie fans that were happy — IT pros thought they’d been given a great data storage medium. But are DVDs really suitable for storing information long-term?

For data managers, the existence of a standard, portable medium for archiving data was very welcome indeed. DVD was seen as safer than tapes and magnetic drives, and more universal than older optical disks. Manufacturers claimed lives of 30 to 100 years for their DVDs, certainly more permanent than anything else around. Over the past decade, millions of files were placed for safe-keeping on DVDs.

But DVDs suffer from a phenomenon called bit rot (also called bit decay, data rot, or data decay). Bit rot happens when the single bits of data get wiped out or modified. This always existed on electricity-based magnetic media, which is why programs sometimes “went bad” on hard or floppy disks. But DVDs (and CDs) have similar problems. Unlike magnetic disks, writeable DVDs store bits using a set of dyes under the surface, dyes that are “imprinted” using a laser to turn on and off specific bits.

The rate of decay can be influenced strongly by storage conditions. Humidity, temperature, light and handling can cause changes in the dyes, and therefore, DVD archives should be stored in a dark, cool, low-humidity environment with minimal handling. That’s still not the practice at many companies.

But even with the greatest care (and the best gold-plated archival DVDs), bit rot does happen. After all, it can only take a few altered bits to change a critical number or for a critical link to get altered.

The problem is that DVD technology dyes are vulnerable to a wide range of environmental changes. And what about Blu-Ray? Apparently it’s even more vulnerable, as its dyes are even closer to the surface.

Need proof? The U.S. National Archives (people who we assume know something about storing data) says: “CD/DVD experiential life expectancy is 2 to 5 years even though published life expectancies are often cited as 10 years, 25 years, or longer.”

This means that if you use DVD, you should make several backup copies, and you need to test them regularly and re-burn DVDs every few years. It’s in no way a permanent or even long-term archiving solution.

One solution you might check out comes from a new startup called Millenniata.

Millenniata writes on DVD-size media using an altered DVD writer with enhanced lasers. Instead of altering dyes, it actually writes tiny pits into the discs, below the surface. These pits are unalterable under any normal condition. The company even shows off in a video by plunging the written media into liquid nitrogen, then boiling it, then reading it good as new. (Don’t try this with your regular DVDs.)

While it requires special disc media and a special drive to write them with, these disks can be read using most desktop DVD drives (the company notes that they have found some really cheap drives that don’t work very well). The “etched” bits look like regular dye bits to the reading system of standard DVD drives.

The company, which has been working with Sharp Electronics, is starting to ramp up its marketing efforts and finish testing with some major archivers (governmental and corporate). It’s also undergoing more rigorous third-party stress tests.

The list price of the disc writer is $2,500 and the list price of discs will be $15. Not cheap, but think of the cost of testing and re-burning hundreds of DVDs or the even bigger cost of losing critical data. Keep an eye on this company –- if their claims get borne out, this will revolutionize the data storage industry.