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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 |
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The situation is analogous to that of the security industry several years ago, when a broad range of individual products, including firewalls, user authentication, intrusion detection systems, virus scanning, and the like, were sold individually and poorly integrated with each other. It was far from obvious how companies could build an effective security perimeter, and in many ways that discussion is still going on.
Patterns of acquisitions provide insight into the direction of any new market segment. In the ILM world, the first volley in the product consolidation war has been the scramble for e-mail archiving solutions. Veritas snapped up e-mail management vendor KVS and now markets its Enterprise Vault; StorageTek offers its own Email Accelerator; EMC's purchase of Legato netted it EmailXtender and the similar DiskXtender; and HP has repackaged the fruits of its acquisition of Persist Technologies into RISS (Reference Information Storage System).
E-mail archiving systems not only reduce redundancies in the e-mail database that could blow out the size of that database, but separate the content of e-mails from user's inboxes. Messages are normally stored within an individual user's mailbox space, but in a managed e-mail environment the messages are moved into a central repository and the users' copies replaced with a small pointer to the message within the database.
This approach is a great example of ILM's possibilities: by centralising, organising and, indexing the e-mail message store, an e-mail management system can both prevent users from deleting critical information, and facilitate quick retrieval of messages by keyword.
It isn't a surprise that ILM spending sprees generally begin with e-mail: surveys repeatedly show that managing e-mail has become critical to effective governance. Last year, a Vanson Bourne survey of 100 retail; transport and distribution; finance; manufacturing; and other companies revealed that more than 70 percent of finance, retail, and manufacturing companies had no way to stop users deleting their important e-mails.
At the same time, the problem was expanding in scope: 64 percent of those surveyed reported e-mail storage requirements had increased by up to 40 percent in the previous year, while 20 percent said the volume of e-mail managed had increased by more than 65 percent. Forty-nine percent of the companies reported having had to search back-up media for e-mails at some time in the last three years, but only 19 percent said they would even be able to restore an e-mail that was more than 12 months old. These are worrying statistics given that adequate governance now demands the ability to locate e-mails well into the future.
E-mail management makes use of a critical and fundamental aspect of ILM: storage doesn't have to be top-shelf stuff. Given ongoing increases in data volumes, most companies have spent considerably to keep buying more and more hard disks -- typically, the expensive Fibre Channel drives associated with Fibre Channel-based SANs.
Recognising that this becomes problematic in the long term, storage vendors now offer arrays built out of less expensive Serial ATA drives, which are made in much larger volumes and offer better price/performance than the high-end Fibre Channel drives. Such "nearline" disks may not operate as quickly as Fibre Channel, but that may be fine for storing e-mails more than 60 days -- which can be automatically moved from high-speed SAN drives to a slower storage array.
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