Not Information Lifecycle Management but Information Value Management.

Customers have been inundated with marketing collateral recently about a seemingly new concept called Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), or the process of automatically migrating data across storage media throughout the life of the data. Vendors claim that now, managing information throughout its lifecycle from creation to deletion should be a priority. This has long been a concept held and executed at the mainframe level that is now taken hold in the distributed world due to explosive data growth, compliance issues, and the reality that budgets for hardware and people can't grow at commensurate rates.

More specifically, there are three factors forcing customers to rethink the way they manage storage: cost, compliance mandates, and internal policies on data management. The cost of storage today makes it nearly impossible for organizations to afford to squander their storage resources. Better examination of the data stored on their systems and the value it offers is crucial to better align IT strategies to greater business goals. With storage needs growing at a rate much greater than storage budgets, it is critical to manage and archive data according to its business value while considering accessibility, recoverability and the ability to leverage the data for business intelligence. As information grows less critical to the business, it should be moved to less expensive media, proportional to its business value. This is the approach envisioned by IBM some 30 years ago with the advent of hierarchical storage management first used in mainframe environments. Today, managing the value of information is the first step in better integrating and managing data scattered throughout organizations in order to find ways to identify the right data and put that information to use.

It is not good enough to think of storage management as Information Lifecycle Management. The objective should be to attain Information Value Management or, more specifically, to know what you have on your storage network and implement policy-based automation for the appropriate placement of the data in line with your cost, compliance and internal policies.

First Step: Find Out What You Have

With data growth rates doubling every year, many companies find the issue they are grappling with is not that their storage is growing too fast to handle but, surprisingly, they simply don't know what they have. This is one of the primary obstacles to moving toward an information management strategy based on the value of the data contained within an organization.

The value of data in the data center is a mystery to many organizations. Upon further analysis, many find outdated, unused and obsolete files that can easily be deleted or migrated off to cheaper storage media. Quite often, these outdated and obsolete files are the main reason that companies' data levels are continuing to grow unchecked, making it harder to categorize the key data--much less, to prioritize business information based on its value and importance to the business.

This is true in organizations of all sizes. In talking with numerous customers who pride themselves on organizational efficiency, IBM found that the storage environment is often one of the last areas they turn to for improving business efficiency. While many organizations invest millions of dollars in total quality management programs and push to achieve process perfection in business, a quick look under the covers of their storage systems reveals a lot of room for improvement.

An informal survey of IBM customers showed many had data growth rates as high as 50% per year. In almost every instance, data centers were riddled with inactive files, multiple copies of data or non-critical data. They had less valuable data stored on more expensive storage media. One reason for these patterns is a perception among end users (i.e., employees) that storage is free. This misconception among end users can prove to be quite costly.

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Today's business environment makes it impossible for organizations to afford to squander any resources. Better examination of the data stored on their systems, and the value it offers, is crucial to better align IT strategies to greater business goals.

Understanding and measuring what is in your storage network is the initial step in setting up an information value management strategy. This is also critical to developing a data retention and regulatory compliance strategy, which can help reduce cost and risk, and also improve data accessibility. The end result can give organizations a competitive edge by aligning the flow of information across the enterprise as it relates to customers, suppliers and partners, so that data can be better accessed and used. It can also help ensure sound storage management practices that can help withstand the rigors of an audit or legal examination. Following are some ways companies can gain insight into the value of the data on their systems and make better decisions about their data management strategies

Audit and Report to Control Storage Growth

Through monitoring and reporting, storage resource management (SRM) software can help gather information about how storage resources are used by various applications, departments and/or lines of business. Through historical trend analysis, dependencies in the business can be identified and storage resources can be allocated appropriately based on growth and cost projections. The end result is better control of storage growth with automated identification and movement of low-activity or inactive data to lower-cost storage. For organizations challenged with business or regulatory requirements, this can also help manage the cost associated with storing outdated but important data for regulatory or book-keeping requirements.

Classify Your Data

Data should be categorized based on the type of information and its relative value to the business goals of the organization. This is key to effective capacity management. It allows valid data (the data that is actively being used in the generation of revenue) to be pooled and shared, while older or less valuable information can be stored and archived for future reference. This ensures that mission-critical data is readily available on demand, without wasting valuable resources that could be better used in another capacity. Likewise, categorizing data also helps prioritize and ensure the recoverability of data based on its value to the business.

Empower Storage Administrators Through Automation

With the use of SRM tools to monitor and analyze storage trends, and taking the time to accurately classify data based on its value, the next logical step is to move toward automation of many common storage management tasks. Automation can eliminate or minimize manual intervention--shrinking the time it takes to do routine tasks, saving budget and resources to manage the storage network, and reducing the chance of human error. For example, a file system running out of storage capacity can slow down application performance, hinder users and eventually lead to costly work stoppages.

Automated solutions can monitor the capacity of the file system and policies can be set to automatically add capacity, shift resources and alert the administrator. This solves any immediate problems and protects against downtime. It also empowers administrators to more easily manage heterogeneous storage, and frees them up to focus on other more mission-critical tasks.

Open Standards for Consistent Data Management

The best way to integrate across and beyond the enterprise is to build on standards-based storage technology, rather than putting faith in proprietary architecture. Standards-based storage software can help companies integrate and automate business processes and provide flexibility of choice in storage providers without having to change the way the environment is managed. There is no room for rip and replace or being locked into one hardware vendor in an effective information value management strategy.

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Finally, while Information Lifecycle Management is certainly not a new concept, focusing on this one aspect of data management can be too limiting. Management and protection of information is one of the most important tasks facing IT organizations today. There is considerable payback to optimizing the cost and performance of storing data. While some vendors tout lifecycle management of data, it is really the value of the information you are managing that should take precedence. This process first begins with understanding what is stored and auditing and classifying data in order to take advantage of the time and cost savings associated with automating common storage management tasks. Finally, this enables a storage environment in which information can be managed based on its value to the organization. The end result will be a newfound ability to leverage existing data for business intelligence, and better access to data for compliance purposes.

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Laura Sanders is vice president, IBM TotalStorage Open Software (Austin, TX)