Four Key Elements for ILM

By Michelle Savage

May 29, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)
With the explosive growth in storage needs continuing to increase exponentially in the enterprise, a business’ ability to manage data is more important than ever. Industry experts believe information life-cycle management (ILM) may be the solution to data management challenges.

According to Carmen Carey, CEO of CopperEye, a provider of data retention and retrieval solutions, ILM is driven by a number of forces, all of which are related to cost and accessibility. The use of new technologies that create large datasets, such as cell phones, videos and online transactions, bloat data file sizes beyond previous trends. In addition, regulatory compliance is mandating data storage be retained for many years, in some cases decades or even longer. As a result, the storage systems required to retain such data are becoming larger and need to remain in service longer, adding to cost and operational overhead and resulting in data center sprawl.

Businesses need to get more diligent about exactly what data they store and for how long, said Carey. “People need to hold data for periods of time, and they don’t necessarily have options to get rid of it because it’s valuable,” she said. “ILM gives them a viable option for finding a way to work around the demand of keeping the data. It’s not just the length of the time, it’s also the volumes that are now being generated—we’re creating more and more data everyday.”

According to Dan Crain, CTO of Brocade Communications, a data center networking solutions and services provider, rather than being just another buzzword, ILM holds the key to harnessing the power of enterprise file systems, block storage and databases to align IT operations with achievement of overall corporate business goals.

Crain explained that typical block-based storage knows nothing about what data is being stored. Rather, it is only within the file system that context about the data can be assigned. This context provides the necessary categorization of various sets of information and subsequently dictates the data retention policies of the individual sets of data. “File awareness is the backbone of ILM,” said Crain, as “attributes can be assigned to file system indexed data.”

Related Search Term(s): Storage hardware, storage management

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