What's in Store: Debunking information life-cycle management promises

Storage Networking World - Over the past six months, the term information life-cycle management (ILM) has become the new storage industry buzzword that vendors use to describe a fundamental shift in the way enterprise customers will store and manage their corporate data and information.

The problem most customers face is that there is no consistency among storage system vendors' philosophies on ILM -- what they mean, how much integration is involved and how long it will take to get there. That can make it daunting to get a clear understanding of this new omnibus deployment philosophy/storage best practice/storage operations process.

The broader problem is reaching this state of nirvana in which ubertools manage each step in the life of corporate data, from inception to deletion. It is also more than just tracing corporate data's life cycle -- it will ultimately include an overall strategy to manage corporate information.


Implications of ILM

This column examines what ILM really means, where the overall vendors' positions fall short (without naming names) and what to consider when evaluating storage vendors on their ILM strategies.

Starting with the basics: ILM is a process and deployment strategy that changes the way corporate information is managed. It's meant to assist customers in the tiering of storage based on application requirements and the value of the data. It's arriving as part of a perfect storm impacting customers in a number of ways. While there's reason to be bullish about how enterprises will take advantage of ILM, the storage industry isn't out of the woods in providing the tools, processes and strategies that customers will truly need to get there.

ILM is a response to the growing demands placed on enterprises to do a better job of retaining key corporate data and meeting ever-emerging regulatory compliance issues. ILM is coming of age at a time when corporate information is increasingly becoming an asset that has to be managed differently. There's a need to better integrate content and storage management technologies. And, as the growth of digital content storage increases, enterprises will need to improve the management of this content in a more efficient way.

ILM currently includes a series of storage software and systems that tackle different aspects of the data life cycle (provisioning, monitoring, protection and restore, replication, access and share, migration, archiving, deletion). In addition, it prompts a process that creates orderly organization of data across these stages. This includes the ability to identify the value of the data and then use a mix of storage management, storage systems and deployment