It's rare that a storage product announcement these days isn't somehow connected to information life-cycle management, or ILM.
Vendors, whether they are selling disk, tape or storage software, are promoting ILM. Product offerings vary, but the sales pitch is fairly consistent: Customers need ILM to manage staggering amounts of data. Vendors say ILM will provide a comprehensive framework for managing data from creation to deletion.
How ILM proposes to do this is tough to describe. The idea is to automatically migrate data to the most cost-effective storage platform based on the data's value to an organization. The goal is to optimize the use of expensive storage resources.
Vendor enthusiasm for ILM is unmistakable. But for government customers, it isn't necessarily a top priority. "It's kind of a new concept to us," said Tom Urbanik, systems software manager at the New Mexico Department of Transportation, which has been more concerned with shrinking its backup
window.
Indeed, ILM may be nowhere near the top of the to-do list for organizations absorbed with data-protection strategies, e-mail archiving and other storage priorities. And even if customers were ready for ILM, many observers believe a complete ILM solution has not yet arrived.
"We're two to three years away from vendors providing full ILM suites that resemble the visions we're seeing from them today," said Peter Gerr, a research analyst at Enterprise Storage Group.
Those issues aside, customers may begin laying the foundation for ILM even as they grapple with more immediate problems, industry executives say. Indeed, ILM is so broad in scope that many customers may already possess elements of the approach, even if they don't know it.
ILM illuminated
ILM has emerged as industry's antidote for customers' greatest storage challenges. Vendors see it as the vehicle through which they can address the big data problem, said Bill Yaman, vice president of the software division at Advanced Digital Information Corp., a tape library vendor. Through ILM, vendors expect to address a range of data types — structured data such as database records, semistructured data such as e-mail messages and unstructured data such as word-processing documents.
This ambitious vision encompasses a variety of storage products. At the hardware level, ILM presupposes the existence of a multitiered storage environment. Such an environment might include primary disk storage, a middle tier of near-line, less expensive disk storage and then archival storage, usually in the form of tape. Various software products shuttle data to the appropriate storage layer.
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