ILM (Information Lifecycle Management)

Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is a complex, cross-functional, and interdepartmental strategy, a set of practices for managing the storing, access, and protection of business information in alignment with service-level and cost-of-ownership objectives. A successful ILM foundation enables IT organizations to align storage assets and costs with the applications that matter most to the business, while delivering a more cost-effective level of service to the applications and data that are not as critical. But trying to implement ILM without having a strong management foundation is risky, and can lead to mistakes, cost overruns, and project delays. ILM has grown in importance because of stringent new regulatory requirements in data retention, the increasing cost of retaining and managing data for extended periods of time, and the increasing cost of managing the complexity and capacity demands of unstructured data types (documents, presentations, media files).

The main goal of ILM is to ensure that strategic information and documents are stored on costlier storage with better response time, data retention, and recovery time characteristics. Conversely, ILM puts data that has been classified as less important (based on age, business relevance, etc.) on less expensive storage with weaker performance and availability qualities. By synchronizing the storage infrastructure with business requirements, enterprises can respond more cost-effectively to data reference patterns.

For example, a financial analyst's prospectus on a particular stock might have great immediate value to investors when it's first published, and so requires highly available storage. However, it's likely to be less valuable a year later when the market climate has changed and a new analysis has been published. At this point, archival to tape may be appropriate.

Similarly, a sales presentation to a prospect has a high level of intrinsic value immediately before and after the presentation, but its value diminishes over time as new presentations are created and new prospects are targeted. Keeping the prospectus and sales presentation on high-performance storage where access and availability are optimized - even after the value of these documents has diminished - is a costly and potentially wasteful use of resources. Over the course of several weeks, these documents will be backed up at least once a week and sent off-site multiple times. Multiple copies of the same documents will have been e-mailed and copied to various servers in the same network. Lastly, recovering from a disaster may well mean recovering multiple copies of potentially obsolete information.

Collaboration applications such as e-mail are good candidates for ILM, since the intrinsic value of an e-mail drops dramatically after it's been read. At the same time, many industries have strict regulations for e-mail retention. With an ILM strategy in place, these messages could be put on lower-cost disk arrays or tape, archived in a warehouse, and/or eventually destroyed to provide the appropriate levels of service at more affordable price points.

Heterogeneous Storage Infrastructure: A Key Enabler of ILM

To implement an ILM strategy that offers the flexibility needed to satisfy varying service-level, cost, and data retention requirements, businesses must be free to create a heterogeneous storage infrastructure using a variety of vendors and/or technologies. Lock-in to a single storage vendor; using only high-end, mid-range, or low-end storage devices; or choosing only specific storage technologies - DAS, NAS, and SAN - or protocols - ATA, SCSI, Fibre Channel, iSCSI - are unlikely to satisfy all of an enterprise's present and future ILM needs.

Multi-Vendor SRM and SAN Management

To satisfy the core ILM requirements of storage resource flexibility, IT organizations must be free to select and implement the storage technologies best suited to their business and budgetary needs. The only way to cost-effectively manage a heterogeneous storage infrastructure optimized for ILM is to have a multi-vendor management platform in place that combines storage resource management (SRM), SAN management, and provisioning. With such a solution, IT managers will be free to mix and match storage technologies, without worrying about how to manage the overall capacity, performance, and health of the storage infrastructure. Of course, having a multi-vendor storage area management platform in place before you begin implementing your ILM initiative will help ensure the success of the overall project through better planning and preparation.

The Role of Industry Standards

The Common Information Model (CIM) standard and Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) can greatly simplify the management of ILM-optimized storage infrastructures. By selecting storage hardware that is compliant with CIM and SMI-S, or by choosing a management solution that monitors and manages storage infrastructure in accordance with these standards, businesses and IT organizations can both benefit from:

• Flexibility: IT can add new storage technologies in a plug-and-play fashion to meet changing business needs
• Scalability: IT can quickly increase capacity to meet ever-increasing data storage and data access requirements
• Manageability: IT efficiency and processes are maximized as a result of being able to manage the heterogeneous storage infrastructure through a single, consistent user interface
• Investment Protection: IT staff is trained on a single standards-based management platform, rather than a wide range of proprietary point tools
• Lower TCO: By leveraging the CIM object models native to Windows and some Unix systems, standards-built management solutions have lower memory and agent footprints.

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