Invest Lots More!

At Byte and Switch's StoragePlus event in California last week, customers made plain their distaste for the way vendors describe their wares. (See The New Storage Lexicon.) And when it comes to Information Lifecycle Management, they're more than fed up. As our Editor-in-Chief Terry Sweeney points out, "References to ILM prompted one of two reactions from StoragePlus speakers or attendees snickers or eye-rolls."

They can't be blamed. ILM is supposed to be about storing data according to age or importance across tiers of progressively cheaper storage devices. The point is to make sure you're not eating up expensive SAN drives with stuff you don't need to save, or that, conversely, you're not tossing something onto tape you might need to rapidly retrieve from disk later on.

But perhaps no term since "storage networking" has been more mauled by suppliers, who've given ILM meanings of their own.

Take EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), with yesterday's announcement of Infoscape, the first in its promised lineup of Intelligent Information Management (IIM) products and services. (Don't forget the services – they're important.) (See EMC Peels Back IIM and EMC Vows More for Infoscape.)

IIM is a big part of EMC's ILM strategy. (See EMC Intros IIM.) But don't expect to realize any ILM benefits until you've forked over for the following:

Now, I could be wrong, but it seems that more than $125,000 is a lot to spend in order to save. (If you think the math works, please don't hesitate to hit the message board below, or write to me at [email protected].) When it comes right down to it, EMC appears to be using IIM – and, by association, ILM – as an umbrella term for a whole new set of products and services that are locked tightly into EMC's hardware.

Granted, EMC isn't alone in touting the benefits of an overarching strategy linked to ILM. Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) takes a similar stance, using ILM to market sets of equipment, software, and services that customers might otherwise not buy together. (See HP Launches ILM Blitz.)

This isn't to say ILM can't work, or that products can't help you get there. Indeed, there are success stories out there. (See United Rentals Buys Into ILM.) You might even save money buying a bunch of kit from one vendor to get an ILM strategy going.

For the really big vendors, though, ILM, as a term and a concept, is just too good a marketing opportunity to pass up.

Still, it's not entirely the fault of the big vendors that ILM has become a turn-off term. Any general definition of ILM is confusing to start with. What does it really mean – data management, hierarchical storage, tiered storage? And what about security and access control? What's more, many users insist that ILM isn't really about technology alone, that the roots of ILM lie in getting end users and executives to buy into a reasonable way of managing internal data. (See Get Users Involved, Says Yahoo Boss and Intel Faces ILM Challenge.)We could also be misreading the signals from storage consumers. So we've set up a reality check in the form of an online poll about ILM. Weigh in and tell us what you think at ILM = Invest Lots More.

— Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch