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NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: 09/23/04
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Today's focus:  Justifications for information lifecycle
management

By Mike Karp

In the next several newsletters we are going to discuss two
technologies, both of which are likely to exert a profound
influence on storage and storage management during the next few
years.  First we will look at information lifecycle management;
then, we will examine storage grids.

This time however, we will look at these concepts not as
separate areas of technology research.  It is time to consider
them as two important and interrelated parts of what may well be
the enterprise IT system of the future.

First, some justification for ILM.

In a very real sense, the planets (or stars, if you have a more
galactic point of view) are now in alignment when it comes to
supporting ILM.  I mean by this that the following indicators
show that the time is ripe for the values that ILM delivers:

Point one:  Pent-up demand.   Many large IT shops have been
deferring major storage investment for several quarters now.
The result is that many, rightly or wrongly, already see
themselves as being pushed to their limits when it comes to
providing for their upcoming capacity requirements.

Point two: Budgets are getting bigger, but guarded spending will
still be the order of the day.  IT investment, while apparently
a bit looser this year, is still going to be closely watched and
stringently monitored.  It is therefore reasonable to expect
that storage investments will whenever possible try to extract
maximum value, and that the concept of "good enough" will often
replace "best in class" for hardware purchases.

Point three: "Good enough" hardware, when used appropriately,
really is good enough for enterprise IT.  SATA drives have
already achieved widespread acceptance on the floor of the
enterprise IT shop in virtual tape libraries and for storing
non-mission critical data.  (Some vendors are also trying to
position a low-cost Fibre Channel drive - FATA - as a
value-based alternative to the high priced Fibre Channel drives
currently in use. FATA has yet to make an appearance ion the
marketplace, however.)

Point four: The opportunity for flexible storage is about to
emerge.  Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) drives are interchangeable
with SATA drives (in SAS cabinetry), and one can be swapped out
for the other without restriction.  Soon, a single array will be
able to provide two or more tiers of storage.

Point five: Moving data is not quite as painful as it once was.
Data migration tools, while still apparently not widely used,
are available from several vendors and allow some level of
policy-driven automation to be applied to the process.
Automated data movement between the various tiers of storage is
the most crucial element for ILM.

Point six: For larger enterprises, storage grid technology now
seems to be a lot closer than we thought.  These have the
capability of providing real-time scalability in terms of both
capacity and throughput.  If this ability to scale - all the
automated provisioning capability that necessarily must
accompany it - lives up to its promise, storage grids are likely
to play a key role in IT, and in the largest enterprise shops
may well provide the most efficient implementation of a site's
top-tier storage.

More on the role of grids next time.
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Mike Karp is senior analyst with Enterprise Management
Associates, focusing on storage, storage management and the
methodology that brings these issues into the marketplace.
Mike can be reached via e-mail
<mailto:mkarp@enterprisemanagement.com>.
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Copyright Network World, Inc., 2004
 

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