When I was taking my data processing (now called Computer Information System [CIS]) courses in college about twenty years ago, I learned that data has a lifecycle, from main storage (an old fashioned way of saying memory), to disks, and to tapes. Although I don’t quite remember if the term Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) was in my text book, the concept of purging data to a lower tier of storage according to the changing demand was taught from both resource utilization and performance optimization perspectives. The astonishing hype and debate around Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) in the past few years often made me wonder if the average CIOs today should go back to school for a class of CIS101.
However, recent developments in information management technologies have taken ILM beyond HSM on tiered storage, with new concepts that actually didn’t exist in my old textbooks, such as:
- Security and legal compliance management – security and legal compliance were not burning issues twenty years ago. However, these concerns should be heavily emphasized today when choosing among data management solutions.
- Content-based data classification – the automation of HSM has extended beyond data movement to include data classification. Data needs to be classified according to not only its physical properties (such as size and age), but also its contents. Content-based data classification should no longer be a manual process.
- Content-oriented business services management (BSM) – BSM is not a new concept. However, BSM solutions had been traditionally architected (and service level agreements had been typically made) from a system perspective. Content-oriented BSM enables more granular, on demand IT services management.
Notably, the newly announced EMC InfoScape software – a product architected to deliver EMC’s Intelligent Information Management vision – provides an integrated solution to address all these new dimensions of ILM. Although the initial release of InfoScape is limited for Windows-based file environments and lacking deep integration with the rest of EMC information management solutions, it presents an important milestone in ILM technology development and sets a new standard for the modern ILM solutions.
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