Don't shortchange people, policies and processes with ILM

Computerworld - At GlassHouse, we regularly survey our clients to keep on top of their issues and concerns. One recent survey on storage budgeting priorities revealed a couple of interesting tidbits.
First, regardless of the size of the organization, cost-cutting is a high priority. Not really much of a surprise here. However, the survey, whose respondents represented companies with infrastructure budgets ranging from $10 million to over $250 million, did find that larger organizations appear to be willing to go to a greater extent to find savings.
While everyone is trying to reduce costs by improving utilization and lowering unit costs, at larger companies additional areas like staff management and data retention policies are also being scrutinized.
The second interesting finding was somewhat unexpected: across the board, information life-cycle management came out on top as the highest storage budgeting priority, trumping compliance, security, and virtualization. ILM has been hyped by analysts and vendors for nearly two years, and now it appears that companies are buying into the concept at least at some level. This is surprising, because it had seemed as though some of the ILM clamor had abated of late. For a time, I used a presentation slide consisting solely of ILM snippets from the home pages of every major storage vendor. Have browbeaten customers finally succumbed to their vendors' sales pitches, or is there another reason?
I suspect that the most likely explanation is tied to finding No. 1: Storage managers relate ILM to cost-cutting. If so, then here are some caveats these budget planners should consider:
First, ILM does not equal tiered storage. It's easy to buy multiple classes of storage. Using it effectively, however, can be a considerable challenge and may fall short of cost-savings goals.
Second, smaller companies can benefit from the experiences of larger ones. Nontechnological factors, including organizational structure and data classification policies, are critical to successfully realizing the vision of ILM. Basically, don't shortchange people, policy and process. The field is littered with underutilized second and third storage tiers.
Jim Damoulakis is CTO at GlassHouse Technologies, a provider of independent storage services. He can be reached at jimd@glasshouse.com.

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