ILM: Edging Toward Reality

Despite the skepticism surrounding information lifecycle management (ILM) a new breed of product is quietly making the term a reality, instead of a vendor-group pipe dream.

ILM, the process of aligning data in tiered storage according to its value, is starting to surface in products geared to specific applications. Software from a handful of suppliers combines data-migration techniques earmarked for specific apps with the ability to archive data in various locations. The result is a closer appromixation of ILM's goal of saving management time and storage money.

This progress comes at a time when ILM has become a diluted and beleaguered acronym, greeted by many IT buyers with the skepticism normally reserved for snake oil.

This wariness is easy to understand. Despite the best efforts of vendors to fulfill the promise of ILM, enterprises seeking this goal have mostly been left to their own devices. Literally.

"ILM vendors say that you have to classify data; it's a stated assumption," says Jim Damoulakis, CTO of consulting firm GlassHouse Technologies Inc. "The problem is [that] they don't give you clue how to do that."The result: Classification schemes and policies are often too broad for any significant bottom-line impact. "Very few people are actually managing the flow of data effectively," Damoulakis laments.

The gap between ILM's vision and its follow-through has been made even wider by rampant misuse of the term. Some slap the ILM label on simple tiered storage hardware; others tout capabilities that overlap with storage resource management (SRM) and hierarchical storage management (HSM). Still others see it as a framework of storage-related business processes. No wonder customers are dazed and confused.

Enter the new breed of ILM software that aims to automate data migration through tiered storage, albeit in a fashion focused on specific applications. In this month's Byte and Switch Insider, Information Lifecycle Management: At the Crest of a Wave, we examine these new products and analyze their role in energizing the ILM market.

The good news: New software allows customers to set data migration policies that are informed by the inner workings of an application. This ILM software contains knowledge of processes and dependencies that change the status of data within a given application.

The bad news: These solutions are limited primarily to database and email applications. Enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and instant messaging (IM) are popping up in ILM solutions, but products are still few and far between. Thus, the vision of a comprehensive ILM product encompassing a range of applications remains just that a rosy dream.Still, the progress so far hints at more to come, driven by a key IT requirement – to improve application performance. Offloading data from primary storage through intelligent, automated policies reduces the processing burden on applications. Who doesn't want that?

Tight integration with enterprise applications also allows targeted and speedy recall of old data into higher-priority tiers when necessary, which is another tenet of ILM that's motivated by new compliance requirements.

More ILM progress is assured by the activity of big players. Two storage behemoths, EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) and Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS), have each considered ILM important enough to warrant an acquisition – EMC with Legato, and Veritas with KVS.

"The main driver of this acquisition was to bring in software that supports the real essence of ILM – the ability to appropriately place data against tiers of a storage environment," says Rob Emsley, director of information management at EMC. He also notes that EMC's purchase of Documentum will figure into this strategy in the future.

Indeed, there are still many who embrace the longer-term, bigger-picture view of ILM nirvana. The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), for example, has established an ILM initiative that broadens the term's definition to an overarching set of management best practices. By the group's own admission, the initiative could foreshadow years of work toward a standard.While many wait for these grandiose visions to materialize, a cadre of unique products is advancing the ILM cause today.

— Brett Mendel, Senior Analyst, Byte and Switch Insider

Information Lifecycle Management: At the Crest of a Wave is available as part of an annual subscription (12 monthly issues) to Byte and Switch Insider, priced at $1,350. Individual reports are available for $900.

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