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For storage vendors, Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is not just a buzzword, but a market direction for the storage industry. ILM brings about a certain holistic approach to information management which duly recognizes it from a lifecycle perspective.

With time, the value of information keeps changing. The way ILM treats different information is what makes the storage vendors sell the concept as a fresh package. However, ILM is not about any different storage hardware or software package solution, but a new tiered approach to storage adoption that encompasses all options currently available in the market.

For any enterprise, implementing ILM means a lot of effort in identifying and categorizing business data, which is primarily a specialists job. Storage vendors, therefore, view topline revenues as consulting services for implementing ILM.

Companies are gradually implementing ILM strategies to protect corporate data and Intellectual Property information. Depending on the criticality of data, organizations are fine-tuning their strategies. It is ILMs policy-based approach to manage the flow of IS data throughout its life cycle, right from creation and initial storage, to the time when it becomes obsolete and is deleted, that is going miles in terms of adding value to organizational needs.

The Hot Verticals
ILM has become an intrinsic part of IT strategy in verticals that have witnessed a huge spurt in data flow. Telecom and banking are the hottest verticals that are driving ILM adoption. The other data intensive verticals being insurance, capital markets, government, and retail.

As ILM also ensures faster retrieval to the critical information that people, or possibly regulatory agencies and lawyers, need immediately, the verticals driving its adoption from the compliance perspective include banking, capital markets, health care, pharmaceuticals, and food & beverage.

In India, the push for ILM adoption was first felt sometime in FY 06. ITC in Kolkata, Tata Elxsi for their Visual Computing Lab in Bangalore, Tata Teleservices in Hyderabad and Mumbai, and Hutch across India are all practicing different stages of ILM. Some of the important ILM players globally are EMC IBM, Network Appliance, Hitachi Data Systems, Sun Microsystems, and HP.

If we break the ILM adoption process into three broad categories: active archiving; database archiving, file/ HSM archiving; and email archiving, then, by Gartners assessment, we should see mainstream adoption worldwide in five to ten years time. ILM is an emerging market worldwide and India is expected to be no different, given that both ERP and email are becoming mainstream enterprise applications in the country.

Outlook
Further, as companies look towards consolidating their servers and storage resources, storage solutions for data centre management are expected to grow explosively. Since managing data growth is going to be the biggest challenge for big customers, issues like value-of-information, desired performance levels, TCO will further justify ILM adoption.

Urvashi Kaul
urvashik@cybermedia.co.in

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