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NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: 01/18/05

Today's focus:  ILM key for regulatory compliance

By Andreas M. Antonopoulos

In dealing with regulatory compliance and data-retention
policies, IT executives can save a lot of money through
information lifecycle management.

With increasing storage requirements and retention policies that
have greatly lengthened the time an organization keeps data, ILM
can ensure that your data is automatically stored on the "right"
medium and at the "right" time.

ILM is a strategy for policy-based management of storage
resources. If you are familiar with hierarchical storage
management (HSM), which is used to move infrequently used data
to inexpensive or archival media, you will recognize some of the
features of ILM. While HSM bases its decisions to move data to a
cheaper medium based on access times, ILM uses more
comprehensive policies that can move data around based on the
intrinsic value of the data. Using these more sophisticated
criteria, IT managers can classify data and define the entire
lifecycle of that data: initial storage, migration to cheaper
storage as the data becomes less important, archival strategies
for the data, and disaster-recovery policies.

Since ILM can mean different things to different vendors, let's
look at some of the key components of an ILM strategy:

* Assessment - To decide how to treat data, you first have to
  know what data you have and where it is. Usually this is
  achieved with Storage Resource Management (SRM) tools that can
  produce reports detailing the usage of all the data in your
  storage infrastructure.
* Classification - Based on the above reports, IT managers can
  classify data using an ILM policy management tool. The data can
  be classified based on a variety of criteria such as age, type
  or value. In a heavily regulatory environment with stringent
  data retention and privacy requirements, data can be classified
  based on the regulatory framework (e.g., patient information
  protected by HIPAA).
* Automatic Data Migration (ADM) - Once the data has been
  classified and its lifecycle policy defined, ADM tools can move
  [[http://www.datasol.org | data]] from one storage class to another based on the policy.
  Storage resources can be put into different classes based on
  their characteristics: online vs. offline - expensive vs. cheap
  - local vs. remote - fast vs. slow, for example.

While HSM provided a useful method for gradually migrating data
to lower-cost storage (eventually archival storage), in today's
regulatory environment, timestamps are not enough to make such
decisions. By providing multi-dimensional classification of data
(age, value, patient information, reference data), ILM allows IT
managers to squeeze the maximum value out of their storage
infrastructures. ILM ensures that data is available, properly
retained and backed up, transparently available to applications,
and stored on a least-cost basis.

You can't get "ILM" as a simple plug-and-play "solution" today;
it's more of an integration challenge and long-term strategy.
However, regulatory compliance is one more reason to start
moving your storage infrastructure in that direction.
_______________________________________________________________
<mailto:andreas@nemertes.com>
_______________________________________________________________

Copyright Network World, Inc., 2005
 

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