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Is a new perception of ILM emerging?

14.04.2006
Researchers at the Information Storage Industry Center (ISIC) at the University of California-San Diego have released the preliminary findings of a study on information life-cycle management (ILM). The study is aimed at reaching an understanding of what ILM means to IT users, from the operational level to the office of the CIO. It confirms some common understandings in the storage community -- that ILM still carries much hierarchical storage management baggage. At the same time, it opens a window to some new ILM expectations.

As you walk through an IT department from data center operations to the CIO's office, the perceptions of the value of ILM change. Put aside your notions about ILM as an arbiter of the value of data and instead think of what is going through the minds of those writing request for proposals, purchasing orders and checks for ILM projects. What value can IT extract from ILM itself? For storage administrators, value is bound up in wringing greater efficiency out of a networked -- and now tiered -- storage infrastructure. However, when you get to the CIO, the picture changes dramatically. Here, the expected value of ILM is expressed in terms of delivering business intelligence to decision-makers. It's almost as if CIOs are saying, "Hey, if I have to build all this infrastructure and sign all these checks just to cover the company's legal butt, can't I at least get some business value out of all this stuff?"

The spectrum of ILM perceptions is what I personally find most interesting in the ISIC's preliminary results. However, I also see a common thread beginning to form that could link storage administrators to CIOs. There is a move afoot within the storage industry to create a consolidated view of data copies. Large corporations have bazillions of data copies for data protection, for archive and compliance, and for data warehousing applications. These have traditionally been seen as separate processes with different goals. Now I see both vendors and users wanting to consolidate these copies from many to few and use them to feed data protection, archive/compliance and business intelligence processes. Could we be moving toward a new perception of ILM? I think so, and I think it is one that gives CIOs and storage administrators what they need.

John Webster is senior analyst and founder of research firm Data Mobility Group LLC. He is also the author of numerous articles and white papers on a wide range of topics and is the co-author of the book Inescapable Data: Harnessing the Power of Convergence (IBM Press, 2005). Webster can be reached at jwebster@datamobilitygroup.com.