"I think there's still a huge amount of hype," agreed Phil Sargeant, research director, servers and storage of Asia Pacific at Gartner. "Every vendor is preaching an ILM strategy, but I do not think any single vendor has a total ILM offering."

The comment rings true when we look at the SNIA's suggestions on the ILM implementation roadmap. The industry association suggests that ILM be implemented in five phases, starting with data consolidation and data classification followed by matching technologies with data categories, developing islands of automated ILM and, eventually, an enterprise-wide ILM initiative.

Although the SNIA provides a comprehensive roadmap for implementation, most vendors are providing different bits and pieces of the entire ILM roadmap and none currently provide the technology to support the entire roadmap, added Sargeant.

In addition, since [the] SNIA is an industry association formed by vendors, IT executives should "be careful about believing anything from SNIA," noted Jon Toigo, an author and CEO of Toigo Partners, an independent consultancy and technical research and analysis firm. "It is ultimately an industry association-not a consumer group, and most certainly not a standards group."

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