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Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) and Container Space Management (CSM)
As mentioned at the beginning of this section, storage is now experiencing unprecedented
growth. This has become the dominant-driving factor for the storage industry to bring
forth a paradigm shift in the way data is handled. A NAS or SAN storage appliance
cannot afford to treat data as just data. Data has matured from being looked just as a
binary stream of ones and zeros to an intelligent entity with values assigned.
This has led to the birth of new disciplines in the storage industry called Information Life
Cycle Management (ILM) and Container Space Management (CSM). It is a key aspect of
Storage Resource Management (SRM), where a context is assigned to the data based on
some value that the block of data possesses. This context could be based on the pattern of
data usage and/or on the content of the data. Data Classification is the discipline where
data is discovered, analyzed and classified based on policies. There are various products
in the market today that do this job online with the incoming stream of data or offline
with data-at-rest. Though the need is felt, the technology of Data Classification is still
very fluid, since the perceived value of data may change over time and cannot be
definitive.
Hard disk drive technology is also seeing vast improvements. As of 2008, SATA hard
disk drives own the market and are expected to dominate for quite some time. SATA hard
disk drives are very economical, but lack the performance and robustness called for by
true enterprise-class storage infrastructure. SAS drives are penetrating the storage arena
with its enterprise-class tag. SAS and SATA drives can coexist in the same SAN network
ushering in a generation of affordable tiered-storage. To effectively utilize these storage
devices that carry different price tags and performance characteristics, an efficient ILM is
now almost mandatory. Scaling within the tiers is attained through CSM, which can
perform re-striping across disks.
According to research conducted by the TheInfoPro Group (TIP), the interest in ILM
over the last 18 months has heated up. The TIP heat index for ILM, which was four (in
order of priority) in Spring 2005, has moved to one by Spring of 2006.
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StorTrends® 1300 User's Guide (StorTrends iTX version 2.7)
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