I posted a comment yesterday, but it apears it got “classified” as something other than a post ..

I believe the true underlying reason that Managing Information, and I hesitate to use the ILM term, is that the people that are supposed to be stewards of the data, us IT folks, aren’t responsible for the understanding of the Information. We deal with tools and such, but tools are useless without the ability to place them into useable context for the business.

ILM was sold to the Storage/IT and not the business side, of an organization. We were supposed to then take what the vendor thought was a sure thing (since we understand about effectively managing capacity, and translate that into a business use case of why we should properly manage our greatest asset, Information.

It is those users that create the data, and hopefully they are diligent to create useful metadata in their documents, to determine what should remain as useful business intelligence and what shouldn’t. Although, many times, users opt for the KISS approach and save everything for eternity and let someone else worry about what is useful and what isn’t.

At home, I find myself guilty of the same, though I try to be more successful at work. I create something and then stick it in one of my folders, and in time, I might go and look back through it. Umm — problem is I tend to suffer from CRS Syndrome and I recreate it again. Search engines only seem to exacerbate the issue, since it finds some many items which may have similar words, that I don’t always know which is which.

The point I’m trying to make is that the tools can only do so much. People are the ones that need to understand how they are to manage information, not technology. I think we tend to rely too much on technology to do it for us and get lazy. And by being lazy, it piles up, then it costs even more to go and clean it up, look at the show Hoarders, cause that’s what we are, but with data.

Oh and the more we place policies and rules on people, the more we tend to resist the process, the rules, and in the end, make lots of money for storage companies. Even as a steward of my companies data, I don’t have the authorization nor the authority to make a determination of what stays, what goes, what should reside where. All I can do is try and educate and hope my people take the iniative to empower themselves in the management of their own information.

That’s the true nature of ILM, and it has nothing to do with IT. Pun loosely intended.

Another impediment to ILM is that once you get down to it, there are too many data movers, creating too many repositories (you mention, email archive, how about file archive, backup, dedupe, CDP, WORM, legal hold, etc.). For each set of data movers and repositories, you have dissimilar policies and classifications, and a separate point of administration. It quickly becomes a huge can of worms, a wasteland of redundancy, where policies, workflows, business processes, the origins of the data, and dreams, go to die.

That all said, we think we figured out a large part of the problem by utilizing a single, real-time data-mover, and a unified, multi-function repository, with auto classification of data at point of creation, and policy tagging for the lifecycle. We also use search engine technology to handle metadata as part of the distributed, grid-style repository. So there are some added benefits to that from an “active information management” perspective (for unified tools like backup, CDP, replication, file and email archive, legal hold, etc.).

So, while you are correct that ILM never really took off, we think that the devil (consistent policies) is in the details (metadata). Vendors like us at Cofio are now approaching the problem from different angles. We are sure things will get interesting for this space in the near future. http://www.cofio.com

–Thanks Ken! I agree wholeheartedly – I’ve just listed some technical issues but the manpower issues do far exceed these! Because classification is so hard, users pick a tier of storage for an application and the data tends to stay on that tier forever. On the file side we have some solutions – moving data to new tiers based on metadata (age, activity, owner) but it becomes much harder on the block side where the storage has no data awareness. That’s forced us to take wholesale approaches to move data to new tiers based on policy and application (for example, email archiving) or LUN activity. Solutions like EMC’s FAST will certainly helps automate the process, with “in the box” tiering based on LUN activity, and virtualization can help automate for cross platform tiering, enabling users to move cold LUNs to bulk storage.