All about the info

Managing storage, new data center style The virtual answer Stolen Data? No biggie Archiving made easier The sky's the limit All about the info The human touch

Say the name EMC today and most people think of storage. Mark Lewis, EMC chief development officer, would like this to change. His marketing message of late has EMC morphing from storage vendor into an information infrastructure company. Naturally, information life-cycle management (ILM) technology plays a role, but so do two other new data center linchpins: service-oriented architecture and virtualization. Lewis describes his big-picture view in this recent interview with Signature Series Editor Beth Schultz .

Storage today is all about managing data based on business value. What's up with ILM?

The value is understood, and now we're talking about implementation in three major steps. Step 1 is tiering storage - defining applications and their uses and then attaching a storage type to them. Step 2 is looking at specific implementations of ILM, with archive and compliance strategies, for the 20% of major applications that are responsible for 80% of the data - your structured data, or database applications, your e-mail and unstructured content files. The third step is a vision EMC is developing toward. EMC's goal is to deliver ILM as a service-oriented architecture capability, where it becomes a part of the infrastructure and viewed just like the network or any other service.

How would that work?

An enterprise plugs an application in to its service-oriented architecture, which would deliver compliance, archiving, data tiering, automated data movement - even data protection and recovery - in an automated way.

With VMware for servers and now Invista for the storage network, virtualization is of obvious strategic importance to EMC. What role does it play in your ILM strategy?

Information life-cycle management has multiple characteristics in which virtualization is absolutely necessary. Imagine if an enterprise has hundreds of applications in this architecture running in a storage array. It can't ever reboot or move the storage array. It needs the virtual layer so it can deliver on the services expectation [of 100% uptime] and keep the infrastructure up without impacting those applications. That's a part of the service delivery of ILM.

You mentioned virtualization is important to ILM for multiple reasons. What's another example?

The second use for virtualization is to enable tiered storage, for improving the class of service and optimization. You can't get this with today's storage.

What if storage could self-optimize? If an enterprise creates a volume that has a silver requirement but gold storage is available, why not let the volume be on gold for delivery of a better service level? And then when gold-level storage is needed, that volume simply moves to silver.

To get there requires a "data object model" - meaning applications, and even users and administrators, would be able to describe their data requirements in a very structured way. From there, a combination of management and virtualization technology will enable the automation and the optimization.