Users: Information life-cycle management standards needed

Computerworld - LONG BEACH, Calif. -- IT managers said they face a daunting task in trying to classify data so it can be stored on systems appropriate to its importance and overall business worth. Not the least of those challenges is changing the attitudes of business units used to getting premium storage for every byte of data.
But users at the first-of-its-kind ILM Solutions Conference here said information life-cycle management (ILM) isn't an easy option.
"The ramifications are absolutely huge," said Joel White, lead IT architect at the Allstate Corp. in Northbrook, Ill. "Just look at any company that's made the front page of The Wall Street Journal. That's just a symptom."
White was referring to companies' difficulties retrieving data for government or industry regulators in a timely manner because it wasn't indexed when archived.
Users and storage vendor executives alike at the conference, which was sponsored by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), agreed that ILM strategies are still works in progress because ILM still lacks many industry standards. They also said it lacks integration between business applications and storage systems, automatic migration of data across all tiers of storage and tools to fully search and continuously access that data once its been archived.
But the sheer volume of information makes it imperative that companies begin classifying data and managing it via policies, users said.
"Compliance provides the opportunity for us to bludgeon our business units to where we need to go [with ILM]," said Scott McIntyre, CIO at San Jose-based Quantum Corp., a maker of disk and tape drive technology.
Mike Peterson, program director for the SNIA's Data Management Forum, said the key issues driving ILM include the inability of companies to effectively manage data, changing business needs brought about by increased litigation and regulations, and the fact that data has traditionally been stored in silos that are unavailable to the entire enterprise.
"It's really an ominous challenge for the IT group," Peterson said.
Peterson and storage executives from EMC Corp., IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Computer Associates International Inc. said IT shops must take time to understand the business processes and goals that could drive ILM policies. They also said the storage industry as a whole must create standards around business application integration with storage systems.

Peter Delle Donne, CEO of Iron Mountain Inc., called full-text indexing the "Achilles' heel" of ILM because, with the exception of e-mail, IT shops are unable to perform searches on the full content of archived databases and other large documents.
Another major issue users