The Battle Heats Up

Information lifecycle management, or ILM, has been one of the hottest
technology concepts in recent times. While the concept came into vogue about
three years back, it is really starting to gain traction now-primarily driven
by regulatory requirements that require storage of information for some length
of time. This implicitly translates into high storage but low retrieval
requirements, and it is exactly here that ILC comes into play.

The common consensus is that HP and EMC have zoomed ahead of others to
compete for the ILM numero uno. Though they share a common aim, Pramod Deshpande,
CIO, NSDL, feels that their reasons for taking the ILM gambit are different. In
today's environment, EMC has realized that only storage hardware could never
take it into the big league of IT companies. For HP, the reasons are more
down-to-earth-barring some success in nearline storage, it has failed to
create much impression like storage specialists EMC, NetApps, or Veritas. Now it
wants to leverage ILM as a medium not only to gain brownie points on the storage
front, but also to use it to push its entire enterprise range of hardware and
software applications.

HP is taking a holistic approach to ILM, which it claims is better than EMC's.
While EMC treats ILM as a storage-oriented issue, HP sees ILM as a function of
overall business processes. Therefore, HP will supply its own products,
including hardware, as well as its storage resource management software, in the
package. Bolstered by a range of acquisitions that have filled its storage
management software and data archiving gaps, EMC is highlighting its plan for
ILM, which is the next step following the solidification of its automated
network storage plan.

David Rogers, manager for product marketing, tapes, HP-UK, delineates what
the ILM strategy says: "The concept of ILM revolves around managing data
and its placement on different storage media, from birth to death, as it were,
or creation to deletion." In the short term, HP would integrate and test
existing solutions, resell software, and provide professional services.
Initially, its focus is restricted to a few key verticals, including healthcare
and financial services. But HP is nurturing bigger plans on the ILM front. For
one thing, it is addressing the issue of long-term data retention, and how you
migrate data between different storage media, and between different hardware
generations. It is also working on establishing a framework for setting policies
and automating data movement of the massive data stores that are likely to come
out of an ILM strategy. Finally, it also provides tools that allow you to do
robust search and retrieval across applications.

On the other hand, Tony Leung, managing director, marketing, EMC
Asia-Pacific/Japan informs that his company is offering software for archiving,
backing up, replicating, managing and virtualizing the data stored on almost any
server. Its first move was to offer hardware with fiber channel and ATA drives
in the same storage cabinet. EMC believes that ILM's fundamental tenet is that
the value of data changes over time, and that the software that manages data
needs to account for its intrinsic value to the organization. EMC is even intent
on delivering on virtualized storage, seamlessly moving data within storage
mediums without end-user involvement.

EMC defines its ILM strategy as multiple tiers: In the first layer, it has
the ability to mix and match any high-end storage media-it can be racks of
fiber channel and ATA. In addition, it also has its full array of NAS heads like
the NetWin series, Celera and Centera, built exclusively for fixed content and
immutability. The second layer involves protection and the data mobility
followed by storage management through ControlCenter. With different strategies
and vision of the two biggies, watch out for some interesting action on the ILM
front in the future.

Rajneesh De