The Next Big Wave

It’s the latest buzzword in StorageVille–you could not possibly have missed the attention Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is getting these days–backed by a solid propaganda from all the leading storage vendors. 

ILM is already being hailed as the next big wave in IT and in storage, so much so that storage companies are even changing their vision statements to accommodate it. “To create the ultimate information lifecycle management company…” goes the new vision for EMC, as announced on September 22 this year. StorageTek too has an ILM approach to its strategic vision.

These apart, almost all other leading storage companies including HP, Veritas and Legato are falling over themselves to take leadership position in ILM solutions. 

So what exactly is ILM and how does it relate to the end-user of storage? Does it mean you need to dig into your wallet again–to buy a new product or software? Is it just a fancy marketing gimmick for storage vendors to peddle more of their goods to you? Or does it pack any real value for your business?

Worry no more. ILM is not exactly a new product, a new technology or even a new storage solution. It’s just a different approach to store same old business data, making a generous use of common sense. ILM is all about management of information in your business throughout its lifecycle. The information lives in data, and data in turn lives in storage–therefore ILM can be interpreted as a storage strategy with appropriate storage infrastructure that takes care of all data in your business–from creation to use, archiving to the final deletion. 

It means…

In a way, ILM is about making the best use of your storage infrastructure. It helps businesses solve “one of the most pressing strategic business issues: how to manage the flood of information, yet lower cost and improve the efficiency of their storage operations”, says Praveen Sahai, national marketing consultant at StorageTek India.

An ILM-based storage strategy draws on two facts: one–all business data is not equal in business importance, and two–all business data changes its value over time. Your ERP transactional data is far valuable than your emails any day, and your weekly sales reports are lesser and lesser critical with each passing week (See box ‘Three Phases of
ILM‘).

The essence of ILM lies in categorizing and prioritizing the business data so that you spend maximum time, effort and money in data that is most critical to your business. An ILM-based storage architecture takes care of data from its creation (by business applications) to final deletion–the entire lifecycle of data. Storing, access, migration, backup and archival and final deletion of data, all are different steps in an ILM-based storage strategy.

The big gold rush

The sudden rush of all leading storage companies towards ILM may seem bewildering to the layman, but it does not amuse industry analysts. ILM is coming up more as “a market direction for storage…it is a direction that the entire storage industry shall move in, much as the case has been with networked storage over last two years”, says Naveen Mishra, senior analyst, storage research, IDC India. 

And the reason why storage vendors are hyping something as conceptual as ILM is fairly straightforward–you need tools to handle the migration of data between different types of storage. In fact, product development teams at many of leading storage vendors are working overtime on new products and tools that automatically migrate data from one type of storage to another, depending on business rules and policies set by users themselves. 

Some of this functionality is already available today in NAS and SANs and storage software from companies like Computer Associates, Veritas and Legato. “Technology is available to support full-blown ILM today and one can implement all of it at one go or in parts, based on individual business needs and data/application requirements,” says P K Gupta, strategic development director, intercontinental operations, Legato Systems. 

These components can implement the ILM concept, but they often suffer from a key limitation–they don’t work seamlessly across storage hardware from different vendors. 

Implementing ILM beckons a wide range of storage components that can integrate and talk to each other seamlessly–ranging from expensive, super-fast and ultra-reliable disk arrays to cheap tape-based solutions. While storage vendors themselves may get excited over the prospects of being able to sell a range of storage components all in the name of ILM–the truth of the moment is no single vendor has capabilities to offer an end-to-end ILM solution today. This is reflected in ILM strategies unveiled by the likes of HP and EMC, both looking at alliances and partnerships to be able to offer a robust ILM platform. 

Not only that, it is also futile to expect a tool that could automatically handle data migration across infrastructure from different storage vendors seamlessly. This feature, signifying true ILM, is still some way off (See box ‘The Underlying Truth’). 

Implementing ILM also means a lot of effort in identifying and categorizing business data, which is often a specialist’s job.

Storage vendors therefore are eying revenues through consultation services for implementing ILM (See box ‘Bringing the ILM Home’). “Any ILM solution will be services and consulting driven,” says Avijit Basu, marketing manager–NSSO at HP India. 

What’s in it for me?

There is a lot of money in following a good ILM strategy. “Even though it is difficult to put RoI in numerical terms, there are unlimited gains from a successful implementation of ILM-based strategies,” says Gupta of Legato. 

A lot of advantages cascade from the mere prioritization of data–you have a small amount of high-quality data to play with in the first place. Two most obvious advantages are cost savings and faster access to critical data.

Following ILM principles may mean your investments in truly high-end storage actually shrinks, once you have pruned the volume of data that actually needs such royal treatment. Data management is far simpler, considering that really valuable data is just a fraction of total data generated any given day. 

Once you have got a handle on your data, you are in a far better state to implement disaster recovery and business continuity planning. You also save both money and effort that would have gone into implementing a disaster recovery solution for entire data–using it instead only for phase I data. Needless to add, business continuity planning is done far efficiently and effectively.

And as Sahai says, an ILM strategy delivers “the right data on the right device at the right time in its lifecycle at the right price, and at the right service levels”.

Even though ILM today suffers from a low awareness among enterprises in general, the new approach to data is soon going to become a business necessity what with massive growth of data that enterprises are grappling with. However, for businesses it may still be a good idea to wait before standardization takes place in the market, unless of course they are willing to migrate their entire storage infrastructure with a single vendor. 

Besides, one of the prerequisites of an ILM solution is storage consolidation. To get themselves ready to adopt ILM, businesses should begin with the first step–migrating from conventional, isolated direct attached storage to consolidated, networked storage. 

RISHI SETH in New Delhi

Bringing the ILM Home 

In the absence of many ILM-ready products and automation tools right now, the true advantages of ILM are still beyond the grasp of businesses. Data migration between different types of storage still remains largely a manual process, although new software releases from vendors should take care of that soon.

ILM is all about categorizing and differentiating data in the right way. Different types of organizations value different types and volumes of data as most critical–for example, the volume of most-critical data in a bank is usually far higher than the same in a manufacturing company. 

While data categorization is an in-house job, businesses need to rope in outside consultants (read storage vendors) for help with the process of accurately mapping the value of information to the storage resources required. 

“A key part of the ILM process is consulting services for processes–such as deciding what data to keep and what not to keep, and when to move it from high-performance storage to low-cost, low-performance storage and then on to optical or tape storage,” says Rusty Smith, director, ILM division, HP.

Three Phases of ILM 

The concept of information lifecycle management deals with  the flow of data in an enterprise. It divides, categorizes and prioritizes your business data depending on its business value and criticality. For example, your ERP transactional data is far critical for your business than the email data. To run your business optimally you need to store the former in the fastest, most reliable and, by corollary, most expensive storage infrastructure possible, while email data can be stored in a normal storage infrastructure. 

Then comes the actual issue of managing data through its lifecycle. It is not difficult to realize that business data is most precious when it is new and current. 

Depending on your organization, today, yesterday or this week’s data is most critical for you to work on projects, complete invoices, and other mission-critical business processes. This is the first phase of data lifecycle, which is also the most critical. 

Once the project is complete or invoices are filed, the same data reaches the second phase of its lifecycle. Data in this second phase is less critical for your business; you may need to refer to it only occasionally–for data analysis, trend analysis, monthly reports etc.

Finally there comes a time when the same data is so old that you really do not need to look at it for day-to-day operations. This is when data enters the third and last phase of its lifecycle, and it is ready to be retired and archived. 

Now, ILM mandates treating data in all three phases differently. Data in the first phase is the most critical for running business–it’s only the new and current data that brings revenues to your business. It should be accessible all the time without fail, and in a matter of microseconds by the relevant applications. 

Therefore, ILM principles require storing of new data in the most sophisticated, fastest possible, and most reliable storage infrastructure–built with best-of-breed components like fastest performing hard disks, high-availability software and the likes. 

Into the second phase, while the data loses its immediate business value, it is still needed for many routine business processes.

However, these being not mission-critical, a slower retrieval of this data, in a matter of seconds, is not that unacceptable.

Therefore, you can store data in second phase in a slower, average storage infrastructure built of cheaper components.

Finally, once the data ages and gets ready for third phase, it has no immediate use or business value. It is often archived for strictly regulatory purposes, for a time period ranging from a year to a few decades. And retrieval times in minutes for data in this phase are normal. Therefore, you should save costs here by investing in the cheapest tape archival storage solutions. 

Within the first phase of data lifecycle, ILM differentiates between data depending upon its business value. To quote a leading storage vendor, not all data is equal. Your mission-critical business applications generate and use data that itself is mission-critical, for example data from your ERP or the current project is far critical than data in form of emails. 

And while volume of both data may be same, it makes little sense to store non-mission critical data in the most sophisticated (read most expensive) infrastructure. And you in turn benefit by keeping only the most important data in the best storage infrastructure.