ILM is alive and well
I have always enjoyed speaking with David West. He’s one of the relatively few people within the storage industry’s sell-side who genuinely seeks to understand information management - the industry from which I leapt into storage.
After I read David’s recent blog post ILM: What’s Old is New Again, in which he wrote about the return of ILM, I responded with the following comment:
“ILM never left, Dave. That’s a storage industry centric perspective as if storage first brought ILM to the table a decade ago.
Managing information over a life cycle existed long before the storage industry began using the term [ILM], and it’ll continue to persist regardless what terminology or focus the industry fancies at the moment.
The storage industry brought at least two important contributions to the table for information management.
The first was a hard dollar ROI. Frankly, the hard dollar ROI for information management was less compelling before storage companies got involved. Information managers can now highlight ILM’s impact on storage and storage management beyond the usual business user productivity claims. They can now talk in terms of serious savings and bottom line impact.
The second was a forward looking vision of how storage infrastructure could communicate and collaborate with the business application layer to deliver compliance, protection and preservation at the lowest possible cost.
ILM doesn’t need to make a comeback. It never left. Storage managers need to step up their game and understand how the storage industry’s perspective on ILM complements traditional business-level information management. And information management practitioners need to step up their game as well and begin working more closely with IT to learn about and leverage these complementary technologies.”
The important point to understand is that businesses already use many types of applications designed to manage information over its life cycle (independent of storage considerations). The storage industry takes that concept one step further by mapping life cycle management to storage infrastructure and storage management costs.
The challenges to realizing end-to-end ILM (i.e. business-wide information management) are in the integration between business and storage applications, and the collaboration between information stewards (in business) and information custodians (in IT).
Note: Technology professionals sometimes object to being referred to as custodians despite the fact that their role in information management is largely custodial. To avoid hurting their delicate feelings try less objectionable titles such as Information A-Team or Information Geniuses. Remember, your data lives on their real estate.
