* ILM helps to deliver cost efficiency and performance improvements
Information lifecycle management (ILM) is frequently looked upon as a method for enforcing efficiencies upon IT management or as part of a solution to ensure that companies comply with regulatory requirements.
Certainly both of these are benefits of ILM, but how many of us also look to ILM as a means of improving performance? Unless you have been hiding under a rock for the past 18 months, you know ILM is a combination of technologies that permits IT managers to assign data to specific kinds of storage hardware and software assets. High-value data gets the premier treatment – fast arrays, replication, very granular incremental backups (perhaps every few minutes) and so forth. Progressively less-valuable data gets assigned to less-costly hardware and receives fewer services, a series of “demotions” through a storage asset hierarchy that continues down through as many tiers of storage as a company has available.
Of course, this could all be done by hand, but to make it economically feasible data migrates from tier to tier according to a set of management policies that, ideally, reflect each site’s best practices. The result is that data that once was of highest value to the business is automatically reassigned to appropriate storage whenever its business value decreases.
The impact of automatic data migration on high-end devices and on the high-value services that support them is extremely useful in an economic sense, but is also important when we consider performance. Consider the implications if your site lacks an efficient way of providing disk storage for its business-critical data. In such cases, theoretically, less-important data may be relegated to older and less-well supported devices. However, the reality rarely matches up well with the theory. Because of the complexities involved in migrating data by hand, data usually stays resident on the same device. And in many cases, stays and stays.
As a result, business-critical data (this month’s sales records, for example) soon becomes part of a mix on your high-priced storage that also includes aged and less-valuable data (last month’s figures) and obsolete data (the figures from last year). Because all sorts of data – high value, low value, no value – reside on the same device, they contend for whatever resources are applied to that device. Disk space, access to ports, back-up services, and so forth, not available in infinite supply, are strained.
Managers then have the choice of either taking the path of least resistance (putting up with never-ending resource contention), moving the data by hand (often a barely practical alternative at even the smallest sites), or buying new high-end storage to support the supposed increase in high-value data.
ILM, on the other hand, provides an automated way of transferring less-valuable data to cheaper resources, which results in more space on the high-performance machines for the high-value data. When more devices are needed, managers now find themselves able to buy lower proceed assets to support lower value data.
ILM delivers cost efficiency. However, let’s not lose sight of the fact that because ILM constantly clears data off the higher priced assets, managers get the additional benefit of freeing up their existing high-end resources so they can allocate the highest-quality performance and services wherever these are most needed.
