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The information lifecycle management vision depends on a wide range of rapidly evolving software tools to make it a reality.
Behind the noise and hype surrounding information lifecycle management (ILM), a quieter - but no less significant - revolution is underway in the development of software tools to automate many of the processes that ILM involves.
According to Guy Bunker, chief scientist at storage management software company Veritas (soon to be acquired by Symantec), there is now a huge range of tools available to help data storage managers monitor the storage environment and allocate data to different storage tiers according to pre-set policies.
"When you look at the problems faced in data storage - deciding where you keep data and how you retrieve it again - users quickly realise that intelligent software tools are necessary not only to underpin ILM efforts but to future-proof the ILM environment."
Many of these are already available from companies such as Veritas, StorageTek, IBM, Commvault and EMC, says Derek Lewis, sales manager at systems integration company Morse. "Storage resource management tools, for example, are enabling companies to monitor and analyse large, complex and dispersed storage environments so that they know, for example, when a particular tape drive is full or how much bandwidth is taken up by a particular back-up task," he says. Other ILM areas covered by storage management software include: back-up and recovery tools; email archiving; and data migration.
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However, this proliferation of tools to tackle different storage management tasks often means that data storage managers are controlling the ILM environment using multiple applications. That problem is compounded by the relative immaturity of storage management standards that would potentially enable ILM applications to manage storage held in a multiple vendor system.
That is beginning to change, says Galen Schreck, an analyst at IT industry analyst group Forrester Research. "Every major storage vendor is currently working on an implementation of the Storage Network Industry Association's [SNIA] Storage Management Initiative Specification [SMI-S]," he points out. Once known by its codename Bluefin, SMI-S is a set of common models and interfaces intended to allow storage management applications to communicate and manage multiple vendors' devices.
Alongside the standards effort, he says, software suppliers are ploughing research and development funds into designing tools that automate many of the storage tasks that are now performed manually. "While the idea of putting the storage infrastructure on autopilot and walking out of the data centre is attractive, it's not yet practical," he says.
New developments will change that. Automation will increasingly separate management from storage networking technology by hiding hardware complexity, creating a modular management infrastructure and streamlining workflow. "By automating technical tasks and keeping raw technology out of the interface, a small number of generalists will be able to operate an infrastructure that once demanded a large crew of trained specialists," he says.
