It’s widely accepted that up to 80 per cent of data held online will never, in fact, be needed. Why isn’t this data simply removed? Again, it’s mostly because there are no adequate tools to automatically analyse the data and accurately predict which 20 per cent will be required. Sixty four per cent of IT managers do not have a centralised view of all their data.

Integrated Storage Management: enabling real Information Lifecycle Management

"ILM calls for the deployment of a range of different media and storage types that deliver capacity, resiliency, portability, and performance at different price points, with the goal of migrating data onto the most suitable storage medium at each point during its life cycle."

Crucially, though - and terminal to any pretence they may actually contribute to an ILM strategy - most existing solutions are actually unable to ensure that data is copied and positioned in the right place, and in the right format and on the right media. The inevitable conclusion is that any company pursuing an ILM strategy is currently going to be disappointed at some stage in the process.

Integrated Storage Management (ISM): the basis of real ILM

ILM is all about the underlying storage management services and their accessibility to the user and the application. NAS works with best of breed software houses and our ISM suite of products provides a fully integrated, complete storage management approach to the ILM challenge by embracing the ILM philosophy but adding policies and automation. A full compliment of integrated data movement services including backup, archive, migration, replication and HSM, makes it an achievable reality rather than a far off destination.

Essentially, the ISM suite makes the whole set of basic storage management services available to any application throughout the environment.

The longer it takes for Integrated Storage Management/Information Lifecycle Management to become a reality, the bigger the situation to be resolved will become: new IDC research suggests that data will still continue to show an average growth rate of 50 per cent compound, until 2007. This means that, within just two years, the problem will be more than twice as big if left unchecked between now and then.