 |
||||
|
|
|
||
|
Contents 
Introduction
The long road to ILM
E-mail is the word
More than just messages
Learning to let go
Screensound builds an ILM
10 things to know about ILM |
|
||
|
|
||||
|
|
||||
Executives' eyes may glaze over when IT talks about gigabytes and terabytes, but they instantly appreciate the risks of poor data management when contemplating an inability to locate the data necessary to comply with a court order. In one widely cited product liability case, Linnen v AH Robbins Co, the US-based defendant spent more than AU$1.4 million to search 823 backup tapes for e-mails related to 15 employees in question.
Few companies could do much better, so these sorts of costs loom large in the minds of strategy setters. Data management has become fundamental for good corporate governance, which is why managers invariably pull out the cheque books once the risks of not having ILM are pointed out to them.
The process of moving towards ILM is an excellent opportunity for executives to revisit and delineate their business requirements and then to communicate them to the IT organisation, which faces the task of building an information management infrastructure that can meet those requirements.
Many IT executives may have hoped that the data consolidation made possible by SANs would have been enough, but that was just the beginning. If SANs are the highways for enterprise data, ILM is the network of road signs.
"A lot of people said the SAN is going to help lower costs and give greater efficiencies," says EMC marketing director Clive Gold. "Unfortunately, they've learned that the SAN is just the way you plumb things together. It's the software that gives you benefits."
Before you have signs, you will need the places for them to point to. That's where StorageTek and its peers -- IBM, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, EMC, and Network Appliance -- have taken the initiative, seizing the opportunity to define the ILM market in their terms. Yet while there have been some moves in the right direction -- for example, EMC's Centera storage arrays, which will be discussed shortly -- on the whole, most activity in this sector is still chest thumping.
Depending on who you're talking to, ILM is a way of interconnecting storage components; a method for better managing e-mails; an opportunity for data introspection through a major consulting engagement; a new architecture for physical hard drives; a way of modelling business processes in the way storage systems handle data; and a method for aging and retiring information over time. And while storage vendors may have taken the lead in seizing the ILM space, they can't make it happen on their own.
There is no such thing as ILM in a box. It is not a technology, and it is not a product. It is a process, a philosophy for shaping data handling processes according to business requirements and its broad scope extends well beyond the confines of the IT organisation.
"It's the sort of thing that starts a conversation," says Belcher, noting a recent StorageTek survey in which just 17.1 percent of Australian customers claimed to have implemented an ILM-like solution. "We will talk with customers as to why an organisation would consider and decide against an ILM strategy. It's one thing to have a whole lot of technology sitting there, but it's another thing to architect it and have it in sync with what the business requires. We look at every solution on a situation by situation [basis], and we're finding our professional services business is growing significantly."
1%
4%
