'Ask your CFO how much you'll spend next year if you don't add to the data you have,' Scannell said. 'That's increasing year over year.'

Craig Taylor, associate director of open systems at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, said his group is now working to determine how to classify data so migration policies can be applied to it. Taylor's group has built an elaborate storage infrastructure with five tiers of data storage that include EMC Corp. Symmetrix arrays, secondary disk storage systems from Copan Systems Inc. in Longmont, Calif., and tape libraries from Storage Technology Corp.

Even so, 'do we have any physical deletion policy? No,' he said.