Taking charge of the enterprise information lifecycle

All of the files, however, are easily accessible to users. “The difference between accessing files on the SAN and NAS is imperceptible,” Morreale says, “and getting files off the CAS takes maybe an extra one and a half seconds.” Morreale says this tiered storage model lowered his storage and staffing costs significantly and enhanced business continuity, in addition to aiding HIPAA compliance.

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Michael Howard, CEO of ILM vendor OuterBay, says compliance issues account for much of his business. For example, when Tektronix consolidated its Oracle systems from 27 countries to two locations in Beaverton, Ore., its storage requirements exploded and compliance issues became much more complex.

“In the U.S., a customer invoice has to be retained for five years,” says Lois Hughes, senior manager of business application systems at Tekronix. “But in Italy it’s 12 years and in China, 15.”

Tektronix deployed OuterBay’s Live Archive to move transactions from its production environment to a less expensive read-only archive storage tier after two years. Different levels of protection are applied to each tier, because stable data doesn’t need to be replicated or backed up as often as live data. And data on the archive tier is readily available to users. “It looks just like the production environment; no user training required,” Hughes says.

The next step will be to move data after six years to a third tier: OuterBay’s Encapsulated Archive, a self-describing XML archive store. “This brings us from the huge, demanding Oracle application environment to compact, Oracle-release-independent XML storage. We can still run queries and reports. SQL code identifies the owner of the transaction, so the system will know that if the legal owner is Tektronix Germany, it should purge after 10 years and one day.”

Frank Harbist, vice president and general manager of storage software and ILM at Hewlett-Packard, sees yet a third driver: information leverage. “We see more and more companies wanting to use information as a way to help run their business more effectively,” he says. “They want more of it accessible so they can take advantage of data mining, business decision support, and analytics tools to gain competitive advantage.”

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Vision vs. reality
How long will it take to achieve the full ILM vision? Experts only agree that it is at least a few years away. Missing from today’s ILM offerings is the enterprisewide, single-console ideal — tools that would allow an enterprise to classify all its information according to value, set up a single system of storage tiers, and apply migration and protection policies across it all using a single management tool. Much more common are point solutions, each with different emphases and capabilities.

For example, companies such as OuterBay and Princeton Softech concentrate on structured data found in Oracle databases, as well as CRM, ERP, and supply-chain-management systems. Other solutions from EMC/Documentum, HP, and Ixos target unstructured data such as files and images. E-mail archiving solutions from iLumin, Ixos, Veritas, and Zantaz focus almost solely on messaging. StorageTek has separate point solutions for structured data and e-mail. Various other point solutions are available from such vendors as Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, Network Appliance, and Sun.

Second, most current solutions calling themselves ILM only move and archive data. Protection at each tier -- in the form of mirroring, replication, and backup -- is generally left to the storage manager for implement using other solutions. The long-term vision of ILM assumes that a management architecture will tie the two together and manage them as one, possibly as just another feature of an overall storage management platform.

For information awareness to truly become a reality, the applications that capture and use information will inevitably have to be involved as well. Currently, products such as EMC’s Xtender line and OuterBay’s Application Data Management suite act as a kind of application-aware middleware sitting between individual applications and storage, providing information awareness and policy-based data movement and disposal. Also, Oracle Database 10g provides some of its own data partitioning and storage tiering and management capabilities.