Adding to admins' woes is the fact that companies-and especially government agencies-are now being forced by law to store just about everything. "Customers now have a whole lot of legislative and compliance issues to start addressing," says Bowden. "We're starting to see more customers trying to understand what their obligations are from a compliance perspective, what the legal issues are around records retention, and putting in place a policy." Of course, keeping records is not always a burden; sometimes is can be a very useful insurance policy. "We're seeing in legal cases that the people with the best records have more chance of succeeding than somebody who has been demonstrated to have insufficient or incomplete records," says Bowden.
In light of these requirements, the decisions about which data to store and what resources to allocate to storing them need to be driven by policy rather than technical issues. Today, the decision to archive data most often comes from IT saying "I've got a capacity problem, therefore I'm going to archive everything older than six months," says Bowden. But customers should be asking "What do these records mean for our organisation, and therefore how should we treat them?" The answer to that question can be presented as policy to the IT department: "Here's the policy, this is how I should treat e-mail, this is how I should treat my SAP records, this is how I should treat paper documents," says Bowden.
Information Lifecycle management
Combining these concepts of automation, tiering, and policy-driven storage leads to what vendors are now pitching under the title of information lifecycle management (ILM). Roughly this means matching data's importance to an organisation with the performance level and cost of storage it's being kept on. While this can easily be done at a broad level with whole databases or applications, the ILM vision vendors are currently pitching works at a much finer granularity, even down to individual infrequently-used records in a database or e-mail messages.
"We're really going to have to look at how we exploit different layers of the storage hierarchy to drive down cost," says Nieboer. "I'm not sure how we'll get there unless we automate storage management, because we can't rely on human intervention to be timely or effective enough in managing storage."
| "Information lifecycle management is in danger of being over-hyped" Ian Selway, Product Manager for Network Storage Solutions at HP |
If this process were to be done manually, the management costs would be far greater than the savings of moving records from expensive storage to less expensive. Once the tools exist to identify automatically the less important database records or e-mails, for example, they could be moved to another location and replaced with a "stub" or pointer saying "this record has been moved-have a look over there instead".
"Management is of course very important for that and the ability to code policies and that's really the area that will develop in the next year or two," says Heers. "At the moment, the policies are fairly simplistic, it tends to be 'it's this big and this old, therefore it needs to move'. I think they'll get a lot more sophisticated and more in line with business requirement."
Nieboer agrees the concept needs to be refined well beyond merely moving older records around to cheaper storage-that's just archiving by another name. "I think it's a whole strategy of matching my storage costs and deployment to the value of specific information to the business. I will spend more money storing, managing, and replicating data that has high value to the business, and far less storing and protecting data that has less value." The most important factor isn't the age of the data, but "the implicit value of the data to the business".
Key to this development is the addition of metadata-information about each record or e-mail that can help identify its importance-which is something content management software has excelled in. In this light it's not surprising EMC recently acquired content management company Documentum and IBM-which already has strong content management experience-is another leading proponent of ILM. Metadata will allow the ILM software to make judgments like "that's an important document so it should stay here, but that's less important so it can be shunted off somewhere else almost immediately", says Heers.
Like all new technologies, "ILM is in danger of being over-hyped," says Ian Selway, product manager for network storage solutions at HP. "But it's about taking your storage environment and tying it to the business processes." ILM will require a big shift in the way companies think about their IT infrastructure, Selway says. Companies will need to ask themselves, "How does this infrastructure relate to my business processes, and as my processes change, how can I reconfigure that infrastructure to meet the needs of the business?" And any company that mentions ILM and product in the same sentence is probably yanking your chain, Selway warns. "ILM is 90 percent process driven and 10 percent technology."
 |
|
4%
4%
