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…MORE THAN JUST ANOTHER ACRONYMFrom STORAGE Magazine
Vol 7, Issue 5 - August 2007 Few would argue that ILM - Information Lifecycle Management - is a worthwhile exercise that promises much: operational savings, capital savings, long-term management of information, increased productivity, compliance to laws and regulations, and much more. However, all of this becomes irrelevant if the cost of managing the storage outweighs the savings produced by implementing it in the first place. This is why ILM must be treated as a strategy, rather than seen as a single product or solution that can be purchased and plugged in. Implementing ILM, therefore, means identifying the right software, hardware and process at each stage of the information lifecycle. In other words, it must encompass not only business practices, but also the technology used to implement them. It's all a far cry from when ILM first came to market in the mid 1990s - and was driven by storage hardware vendors and solely concerned with layering the storage infrastructure. In this form, ILM only provided a point solution, simply ensuring that the data was classified by its importance, placed in the right location and made easy to retrieve. To tie in with best practice and reap maximum rewards, "Details about the composition of information and its lifecycle were unavailable," says Alan Laing, technical sales consultant, CA. "The increasing alignment between business and technology has necessitated a more comprehensive understanding of information throughout its lifecycle - from its creation to disposition - otherwise known as ILM." Information, of course, is an essential business asset; as such, it needs to be protected, managed and shared. Laing's view is that successful management of information is most effectively achieved through three core disciplines: recovery management; infrastructure management and information governance. "Though ILM has traditionally only focused on the first two, information governance has become increasingly critical, as risk and compliance issues have necessitated greater control over information. For example, organisations are now required to provide specific details about the movements of information throughout the information supply chain, from initial creation to final elimination. The correct supervision and access to information is obtained through policy and best practice guidelines, and can include elements such as electronic discovery." ILM was designed to manage successfully the risk associated with storing and retrieving information. Yet, without the right governance policies in place, this cannot be achieved; even storage efficiency needs to be driven by effective governance. "Moreover, recovery management demands that information can be easily recovered at any point throughout the information lifecycle. Closely linked to service availability, there are many different levels at which information recovery may be required, with the ease of access and availability dependent on content." These two disciplines he sees as being underpinned by the traditional pillar
of ILM - infrastructure management. "This enables a business to maintain the
structure of the whole business through, for example, providing a tiered storage
management model to store information based on different priorities. Many
businesses "This is critical, as ILM policies are changing to encompass physical
records, as well as the electronic records. Physical records have not
traditionally been incorporated into records management strategies; the focus
has been on electronic records, from IM and emails to a company's intranet.
However, CA recognises that physical and electronic records need to be
consolidated, if they are to be effectively managed." "This may change over time as the value of data changes. It is also key to ensure that any compliance policies are honoured by the storage solution," he points out. "ILM is not just about moving data between different storage levels; it is about where it is most appropriate to store this data. The whole objective of ILM is to place data in the optimum location for your business, taking into account both cost and business risk factors." However, all of this becomes irrelevant, of course, if the cost of managing the storage tiers outweighs the savings produced by an ILM strategy. If each of the storage tiers requires different management expertise and data needs to be migrated between systems, then costs can spiral out of control. "The most cost-effective storage technologies for ILM have produced cost savings of up to 60% for users," claims Walters. "To achieve this, an ILM storage solution must enable the ability to support the optimum storage requirements and protocols from a single unified storage solution. This significantly reduces the complexity of managing the environment and perhaps, more importantly, impacts the required footprint, associated power and cooling requirements through reduction in machines and disks by using storage more efficiently." This is a primary goal of ILM implementation. And having a single architectural framework for the storage, so that all tiers are managed in the same way, will minimise the management costs, thus ensuring a good return on investment for an ILM strategy. "Ultimately, before investing in ILM, it is important for an organisation to
understand the data they have stored within their business. The emergence of a
class of ILM systems based on Information Classification and Management (ICM)
technologies provides an intelligent level of ILM functionality; but now with
much finer control in the placement of information within the storage
infrastructure. So what are the top drivers for ILM? According to BridgeHead Software, they rank as disaster recovery (70%); data growth (62%); and regulatory compliance (58%. This is based on the company's ILM Audit 2006, a survey of 350 IT executives in the UK and North America. There have been suggestions that interest in ILM is likely to wane, fuelled by the falling cost of raw primary disk - ie, organisations will just keep all their data on the primary store. But this, though, does not take account of issues such as the rising cost of managing primary storage; the physical constraints [space, energy, unmanageable backup windows] of retaining data on primary disk; and the need to manage data retention periods to comply with regulations. "To tie in with best practice and reap maximum rewards, users must be rigorous when selecting ILM technologies," advises Tony Cotterill, BridgeHead's president and CEO. "First, most users find it makes sense to avoid ILM systems that require a large up-front investment in specific storage hardware, as this extends the payback period. Better to choose a system that lets you start by archiving to your existing hardware. You'll enjoy the benefits of ILM straight away; and choosing a product that's storage media agnostic means you'll be free to introduce new formats as requirements change or technologies evolve. "Strong back-end data migration facilities are also important. Your ILM
platform should be able to migrate data to secondary media, as well as
automatically transferring it between media over time, according to policy. At
the same time, it should be managing retention and deletion requirements, as
well as authentication and access control." Newer systems overcome this by enabling the archive to be written with multiple copies, potentially to multiple media types and locations, automatically backing itself up for disaster recovery." Perhaps one of the most attractive aspects of ILM is its ability to deliver benefits back to the business in myriad ways beyond what might at first be envisaged. "ILM truly does offer the potential for significant cost savings and productivity boosts," says Bob Little, vice president of product marketing at ZANTAZ. "But merely moving information from one storage area to another, while gaining some savings by optimising the type of storage being utilised, does not deliver the maximum benefit possible from a strategic ILM implementation. "A system that reduces overall storage volume by implementing a strategy of single-instance storage for information, and that can fully characterise and categorise that information, offers real and significant reductions of effort and expense. Even greater benefit results if the systems are analysed from more than a storage perspective, so they are optimised to better enable device-intensive business functions such as electronic discovery. Furthermore, organisations must commit to an objective analysis of their information requirements, and the risks associated with failure, to understand those requirements before any technology implementation will be successful." ST |
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