Is Information Lifecycle Management dead?

"There is nobody on the planet that is not sick of hearing the term, because every vendor goes out and says: `Mr Customer, you have a [data storage] problem, ILM is the solution. Buy my stuff.` It has bent the meaning of what ILM is to suit what is in their kitbag," says Chalfant. "It is just vendor foo."

But Hubert Wentzel, divisional director at EOH Technology Consulting, wonders if Chalfant`s pitch is not just "vendor foo" too. "ILM is not new. The problem of information management won`t go away," Wentzel says. "Unfortunately vendors tend to get hung up about their technology and like creating new acronyms and buzzwords."

Chalfant believes `carpetbagger` disk salesmen have corrupted the idea to push additional disk space or more tiers of storage onto business. He believes most companies already have enough storage space. What they are not doing is exploiting it properly. In this regard, he told iWeek of a bank that effectively utilised a mere 1.6% of its total space. "How would you like to be the poor person that had to go forward to the CEO of the company and say: `Yes, I`m wasting 98.4% of everything I buy.` That would be a pretty short conversation ... and yet those are the numbers."

Wentzel and others respond that this may be so, but that Sun has positioned itself to exploit that fear. They claim Chalfant is now effectively saying "Mr Customer, you have too much storage... Buy my stuff."

Regardless of the merit of the arguments, it is clear ILM is a contested term.

FROM CREDIT TO DISCREDIT

"In fact, I`m no longer talking about ILM," says Chalfant. "A presentation I`ve been doing here is entitled `The death of ILM` because it is time to stop talking about the feng shui and get down to what people care about, and what people care about is financial accountability. They care about building an infrastructure that is fiscally responsible to the business."

Chalfant, who claims credit for coining the term, says in 2002, when introduced, ILM had to do with efficient, managed and protected storage. Now it is "everybody`s explanation for what they sell"

Wentzel agrees that there is a lot of hype on the subject and he points out that not all data storage is ILM. "ILM captures, manages, stores, preserves, delivers and disposes of an organisation`s data aligning the business value of information with the most appropriate and cost-effective storage infrastructure," he says. ILM is "not a new concept" as information management has been used by records and information management professionals for well over three decades. ILM, then, is not about the technology.

Vic Booysen, operations manager for the EMC business at Business Connexion, reminds that information "is the most important asset of any business, and its management is essential to success in a competitive environment."

Booysen adds that information is comprised of individual pieces of data that live within the business entity. "Whether it is online, live and active, or historical, archival information, no business can make the correct decisions without it," he says.

He adds: "Information is created, used, and at some point, deleted. Often, however, the information lifecycle is not this simple, as legislation requires information to be stored or archived for long periods of time."

CAN ILM BE REHABILITATED?

Clearly, ILM has a future. Information is vital to business and has a lifecycle which must be managed. "The concept can certainly be rehabilitated, with a proper alignment between what the business really requires and how the technology will enable and support it," Wentzel says. "Too often these initiatives are seen as IT-driven projects to deploy some fancy new disk storage technology..."

Chalfant says rehabilitation lies in making the concept real. "I tell this as a metaphor, but it seems to capture people`s imagination. I tell people that if you go to a doctor`s office, when you sit down in the waiting room, they don`t come out with a tray full of [medication] and ask you what you want. They`ve got to do a diagnosis!"

"We are talking about an information management maturity model and, of course, we have to turn it into an acronym too, so that is IM3," Chalfant adds.

"So the problem with ILM ultimately winds up being that most vendors pressed it as a concept for tiered storage, and the claim was always: `buy another tier of storage and it will save you money.` But the problem with that is there was no defined end state - and there is no roadmap to show you the stops along the way," explains Chalfant. "There was this nebulous vision of `I`m ILM and it is good` but there was no defined process that allowed you to measure where you were, or told you what steps had to happen next to bring measurable value: what is the integration plan? What is the implementation plan? What is the cost of doing that and what is the return on investment when you do?"

BI NOT BS

This may be where business intelligence-style tools enter the picture. Roadmaps are not of much use unless a business knows where it is on that map. Sun uses a dashboard tool called business analytics for that job. Chalfant says "it is considered best of breed" but he emphasises "it is not the only tool ... there are other terrific tools."

Chalfant says, on average, just 30% of storage space is properly used. "No-one should decide what should be done on the basis of industry averages - they should install a dashboard, do the diagnostics and make decisions on the basis of that" - but on an average of 200 Sun customers and all their disk space: 10% of space was wasted because it was orphaned. "Someone had allocated space to a server and the address either got cut off, consolidated, moved or was made to disappear, but the space was never de-allocated and moved back to the free pool."

Fifteen percent space was allocated but unused. "Someone goes to a systems administrator and cries for some capacity, which is granted, but they never do anything with it; so it is allocated but unused."

Five percent is inappropriate use. "It is JPEGS, MPEGS, WMA, QuickTime; people install illegal i-tune servers and bring their music collection in to illegally share... and then there is some stuff that is really illegal, stuff you don`t want to be caught having on your server."

"Forty percent of the data - get this - has not been referenced in six months or more! It is inert: allocated, but inert. That means that only 30% of the volume was looked after appropriately and well used."