The current darling of the storage industry, ILM is based on two simple concepts. First, not all information has the same value to the organization. Second, whatever value information has tends to change over time.

If these assumptions are true, then why apply the same level of expensive storage, management, and protection to all information in an enterprise? By moving less-valuable information to less-expensive storage and applying appropriate levels of protection to each storage tier, companies save money and reserve high-end resources for the information that demands them.

The result: Mission-critical systems are less bloated, more stable, and better performing. Backup windows shrink, storage runs out less often, upgrades are less frequent, and the overall cost of storage and storage management drops.

What it is and is not

Superficially, at least, the ILM concept resembles earlier storage technologies, including HSM (hierarchical storage management) and DLM (data life cycle management). Whereas DLM focused on data as the unit of storage and whereas HSM tended to associate data with applications and moved that data based on a single criterion, time, ILM sets policies based on the value of the information that data carries, regardless of the application or time.

“In terms of information, HSM is brain-dead,” says Jeremy Burton, executive vice president of Veritas’ Data Management Group. For example, he says, one e-mail might require a different storage policy from the next, depending on its subject, sender, or relationship to a particular lawsuit. Similarly, health records don’t always decrease in value; they may have to be quickly accessed if a patient has a recurrence. In these cases, it’s the information contained in each parcel of data that’s important, not the data itself.

The other difference is protection. “In some ways ILM is like HSM, but you protect each tier differently,” says Nancy Hurley, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “So you may snap tier 1every few hours and do incremental backups every day. Tier 2 only gets backed up once a week. Tier 3 never gets backed up; you replicate it and that becomes your store.”
Finally, in most cases ILM assumes that despite migration or archiving, data willcontinue to be accessible for a long time, either as an identical archive instance or as a searchable repository.

Smarter storage now

The two principal drivers behind ILM are exploding storage management costs and compliance. Which one is more important depends on whom you talk to. “Many people assume it’s compliance that’s driving ILM,” Hurley says, “but only two out of 10 users I interviewed cite compliance as the main reason they are interested. Most of the rest cite cost savings.”

Take the North Bronx Healthcare Network, which oversees several New York City public health facilities. “We did some analysis and found that 84 percent of our data is stagnant,” CIO Daniel Morreale says. “So using EMC’s DiskXtender software, we applied some business rules to move the data automatically from our EMC Symmetrix DMX [Direct Matrix Architecture] storage to a less-expensive NAS, if [the data] isn’t used for six months, and then to our EMC Centera CAS [Content Addressed Storage] fixed content storage six months after that.”

All of the files, however, are easily accessible to users. “The difference between accessing files on the SAN and NAS is imperceptible,” Morreale says, “and getting files off the CAS takes maybe an extra one and a half seconds.” Morreale says this tiered storage model lowered his storage and staffing costs significantly and enhanced business continuity, in addition to aiding HIPAA compliance.

“In the U.S., a customer invoice has to be retained for five years,” says Lois Hughes, senior manager of business application systems at Tekronix. “But in Italy it’s 12 years and in China, 15.”

Tektronix deployed OuterBay’s Live Archive to move transactions from its production environment to a less expensive read-only archive storage tier after two years. Different levels of protection are applied to each tier, because stable data doesn’t need to be replicated or backed up as often as live data. And data on the archive tier is readily available to users. “It looks just like the production environment; no user training required,” Hughes says.
The next step will be to move data after six years to a third tier.

Vision vs. reality

How long will it take to achieve the full ILM vision? Experts only agree that it is at least a few years away. Missing from today’s ILM offerings is the enterprisewide, single-console ideal - tools that would allow an enterprise to classify all its information according to value, set up a single system of storage tiers, and apply migration and protection policies across it all using a single management tool. Much more common are point solutions, each with different emphases and capabilities.

Forget the vision

The reality may be that enterprise ILM is too huge a project for many companies to take on. “ILM has expanded to mean everything in storage hardware, software, and services,” Jeremy Burton of Veritas says. “Customers don’t know where to start because ILM sounds like some kind of ERP project that will grow out of control and take 10 years.”

One way companies can cope is to stop worrying about the vision. Instead, start with the areas that are giving you the most pain. For many organizations, e-mail is a major source of pain and a great place to start, particularly with its compliance challenges. Others may find that ERP or CRM data hurt the most.

Wherever the pain is, the first step is a careful process of information discovery, analysis, and classification.

The result of this analysis should be a system that puts your information into categories based on performance, protection, and retention requirements during its life cycle. Then, based on the storage needs identified by each classification, decide on a series of storage tiers, each with its own appropriate performance, availability, and protection service levels. Finally, investigate policy-based automated data-moving solutions, such as those from EMC, HP, Veritas, and others, which address your requirements.

Many companies start ILM with one application or department, or to solve a particular problem, such as compliance. The key is to get familiar with the process and see what it can do for your organization. Then you can argue about the ILM vision over lunch.