History 2003: Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), New Storage Vendor Credo

“Information Lifecycle Management,” three highly fashionable words in the storage industry these days, evoking dreams of a new dimension in business.

Note first off that they don’t contain the word “storage.” The industry is aiming larger now, hoping to manage not only stored data, but all of the enterprise’s IT from start to finish, for the entire data lifecycle.

StorageTek’s definition, as good as anyone’s: “The concept of balancing the cost of storing and managing information with its changing value over time.”

Some data is accessed more than others, and so the value is identifying these patterns, managing them and storing them according to their importance, in order to achieve economies through optimization of processes. It’s not a new idea, of course.

In recent writings, Jon Toigo has noted that IBM implemented this approach in the late 70s, with SMS for mainframes, a less ambitious strategy at the time, of course, given that Big Blue handled the entire data configuration, without the issue of multiple OSs we face today.

We recall that over 10 years ago, the same concept under a different name was alive and well in the world of document management processing, with the similar idea of transferring documents to the most suitable support, according to importance, age and required lifespan.

Basically, it was HSM with data stored on HDDs, optical disks or magnetic tape drives, according to their priority.

Here is a list of companies today using the ILM abbreviation: Commvault, HP, EMC, KOM Networks and Legato. And the list is growing. IBM is not yet in, even if subsidiary Tivoli evokes “Lifecycle Data Management.”

Are they just hoping to muddy the water? Words are all well and good, but to believe that the new marketing term will indeed become the killer storage application that revolutionizes the industry involves a leap of faith we’re not ready to take. It’s a good idea, it’s just not a new idea.

Good enough, however, that StorageTek has decided to file for a trademark for the three words “information lifecycle management”. Consequently, every time the company cites it in its documentation, it adds on the little. We’ve always been struck by the absurdity of a system that affords proprietary protection to 3 often-used words found in any dictionary, particularly when nothing proves that the company was the first to use them together. One of the company’s internal marketing brochures, in fact, reveals that “StorageTek doesn’t have exclusivity on the ILM concept.” They even admit it!

Certainly the competition hasn’t refrained from using the formulation either. A Google search on October 6 at precisely 6:20pm of all sites featuring those exact words, in immediate succession, yielded 17,800 responses. Repeating the search while excluding all mention of StorageTek resulted in 15,400 responses, indicating that StorageTek is only a small part of the trend. And perhaps a bit pettier in its thinking than we’d come to expect…

David Gardner and and Jean-Jacques Maleval