ILM Puts Data in Its Place

The data center at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center isn't remarkably different from those at other large institutions. It houses an assortment of mainframes and servers that provide services such as email and patient-record management to users in numerous departments. In 2000, the medical center—led by Bob Massengill, manager of technical services—implemented a storage area network (SAN) to store data generated by the medical center's applications. The move to a SAN had dramatic consequences. When the SAN was first implemented, it held "2TB of storage," says Massengill. "A year later, we were up to 18TB. Today, we're up to roughly between 60 and 70TB in the SAN." The explosion in the amount of data in the SAN led Massengill to explore a new concept in managing the medical center's storage needs: Information Lifecycle Management (ILM). "To me," says Massengill, "ILM is having the right data in the right format on the right storage platform at the appropriate time."

What's ILM?
ILM is one of the hottest concepts in storage today. ILM, which originated about 2 years ago, doesn't refer to a single product, product category, or family of disparate products. Instead, it's an approach to managing storage more efficiently and cost-effectively through a strategy that ensures that an organization's storage infrastructure aligns with business objectives. In a proposal to the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), the SNIA Data Management Forum defined ILM as "a new set of management practices based on aligning the business value of information to the most appropriate and cost-effective infrastructure."

The core idea behind ILM is this: The value that specific pieces of information have for an organization changes over time. As the cost and complexity of the IT infrastructure in general and the storage infrastructure in particular grow, lower-value information should be stored on less-expensive storage devices.

This notion isn't entirely new. Records management is a well-developed corporate discipline, and records managers have long analyzed the time-value of records. ILM is also somewhat similar to the concept of hierarchical storage management (HSM). HSM, however, focuses primarily on data-migration policies. If a piece of data isn't accessed for a specific period of time, it's automatically moved from one storage platform to another. "HSM isn't value-based," says James Lee, vice president of product management at Princeton Softech, a vendor of database-archiving solutions. "It's time-of-access based."

ILM takes a much more sophisticated look at data and data movement. In many ways, it represents the marriage of records-management practices with the core concept of HSM and solves the problem of costly, inefficient data storage. "When you think about customer pain," says Todd Rief, senior director of product strategy at StorageTek, "90 percent of the world's data in data rooms is replicated information, and 80-plus [percent of that] information is never accessed again. But a large portion of that data is stored on the most expensive storage inefficiently for a long period of time."

Although the need to find ways to manage huge amounts of data is most pressing for large corporations, the idea of ILM is relevant for small-to-midsized business (SMBs), too. Organizations of all sizes can benefit from the ILM approach to classifying and storing data according to its business value.

Why ILM?
Four key factors have focused storage professionals' attention on the need for ILM. Perhaps the most obvious is the ongoing growth of data. Data growth has several significant implications. Too much data can slow the performance of essential applications. Archiving aging data potentially can extend applications' life and eliminate the need for costly hardware upgrades. Heavy data access can also hurt application performance, making it difficult to achieve desired service levels. In addition, enabling widespread access to data raises a myriad of security issues that companies must address.

Data is growing not only in quantity but in type. Email has increasingly become a significant driver of storage growth. The need to manage email archiving has become acute. Simply restricting the amount of storage space allocated to users is no longer sufficient to determine what data should be saved or discarded.

But email is only the tip of the iceberg for new data types that require a new storage management strategy. Image data and Web-based data and blogs are consuming storage space. And as VoIP becomes more common, it's only a matter of time that voice data will have to be stored somewhere, putting more pressure on storage infrastructures.

The third primary development driving ILM is regulatory-compliance issues. A host of recent regulations mandate that information be stored for a fixed period of time and that it be easily and readily accessible. The old notion that data can be migrated to a lower-cost platform, then tucked away in an offsite vault no longer works. Regulators can request data that could be years old, and companies must be able to produce it.

The need to retrieve data whose value is not determined merely by how frequently it's accessed is seen most clearly in archiving email. As Andrew Barnes, director of marketing at KVS, a business unit of VERITAS, notes, companies not only must be able to retrieve individual email messages, they must be able to produce entire email threads and multiple attachments.

The final factor that's spurring ILM is the innovation in storage technology itself. As SANs and Network Attached Storage (NAS) become more prevalent, storage has become more of a shared resource—some even argue that storage is becoming a service—instead of being tied to individual information silos. Furthermore, low-cost disk technology, such as ATA drives, has led to new storage hierarchies. Instead of two tiers—disk and tape—many storage infrastructures now have three or more tiers, whereby data is moved from high-performance production-oriented disk drives to less-expensive, lower-performance near-online (nearline) disk drives for backup and recovery operations, then to tape for archiving. The Wake Forest medical center uses a multitiered arrangement, similar to that shown in Figure 1.

The pace of storage innovation should continue to make ILM strategies easier to adopt. For example, storage virtualization, content-addressable storage, and new tape technology that's specifically developed with the idea that backup can ultimately be divorced from archiving applications, should all find a place in storage infrastructures developed around ILM.