By now, most IT executives have heard of the importance of having an information life-cycle management strategy. Not surprisingly, much of the ILM buzz has been generated by storage vendors eager to jump on the ILM bandwagon.

"If you sell dog food today, you've got an ILM story. Even people with the most obscure product have an ILM story," says Richard Scannell, vice president of consulting for GlassHouse Technologies. "The real issue is that you can't buy an ILM solution today. There's no ILM in a box."

Most industry analysts agree with Scannell that ILM is not a product suite you can buy from any one vendor. Nor will it be in the near future.

"One thing I note when I work with customers is that ILM and how to get there is nothing that's a big bang theory. It doesn't happen immediately or is something you can buy off the shelf," says John Herrera, vice president of global solutions operations for EMC , an early proponent of ILM.

But that doesn't mean ILM should be ignored either. If you define ILM as a set of practices or processes that lets IT treat data based on its usefulness or value to the business over the life span of the data, then few IT managers can deny the potential value of ILM.

At its core, ILM involves classifying data based on varying degrees of importance to the business (such as mission-critical vs. operational).

Once data is classified appropriately based on its value, ILM strategies involve developing rules, service-level objectives (SLO) and management policies that address how each class of data should be treated. These rules define how the data will be stored, protected, migrated and accessed over time to or from different tiers of storage (such as primary, secondary and offline).

ILM and the data center

So, what's the benefit of ILM? Michael Peterson, program director for the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Data Management Forum - which is spearheading its own ILM initiative and five-phase ILM road map - says: "The vision we have for ILM is as a new management process for the data center. The No. 1 problem in the data center today is complexity. The No. 1 problem with owning and operating storage is complexity. . . . The real power of ILM is to reduce the cost of operations by 100x - by solving the complexity problem."