The Archive Piece Of The ILM Puzzle

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•Article: Information Lifecycle Management

Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) continues to be a hot topic in the storage industry. Vendors large and small are promoting ILM solutions using different vocabulary and definitions. While they may agree that the overriding goal of ILM is to provide more intelligent data management throughout the life of the information, history has shown that this is a particularly difficult task.

One of the biggest challenges to a successful ILM strategy is in understanding how information is used and quantifying its value; turning unstructured data into structured data. Since so much information today is natively unstructured and defies attempts at categorization, organizations struggle to implement broad-reaching ILM strategies. However, it is possible to point to success with more focused applications where the nature of the data is better understood and where vendors have sufficiently sophisticated solutions. An excellent example of this is archival storage.

There has been tremendous growth in the archival storage market over the last several years. Because this growth has been driven by corporate policies and industry regulations addressing specific processes and records, there is normally a good appreciation for the data types that need to be archived and their required retention periods. Even this basic level of understanding adds a degree of structure that makes it practical to establish and maintain a successful archive, a crucial piece in the larger ILM puzzle.

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•Article: Information Lifecycle Management