Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)
"The value in the storage industry is derived from the data itself." - Fred Moore, President -
Horison Information Strategies
Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is not a new concept, just one that has typically not been available across
your entire enterprise. Managing your data from creation to deletion is a difficult and often expensive task
that requires a serious plan. The millions of files in an enterprise - many of which are continuously changing
as business data changes - are subject to layers of business and legal requirements. ILM Solutions deliver the
flexibility and adaptability to assist in applying these requirements to each piece of data.
- HSM Systems can move data between different storage tiers - but which data do you move and when?
- ILM does not exist without first understanding your data profile - one size does not fit all departments, especially when they pay for service.
As information continues to grow at exorbitant rates, knowing when your organization can finally delete the data is
not only contingent on usage, regulation and governance. It relies on you first understanding your data profile,
building an infrastructure that moves data according to user needs versus cost and then finally insuring that
contaminants are not resetting your file access dates so information can be deleted. These contaminants such as
virus checkers, server rebuilds, bulk copying and rogue applications can "touch" files and alter your meta-data
to reset important dates for managing ILM.
Visualize File Access Patterns
 |
| click to view |
FileCensus helps you seeing the big picture clearly and ensure your data is properly managed, cost is minimized and
the infrastructure optimized.
This report can be used to 'see' the ages and access patterns of all the files in the network. The three lines,
blue, magenta and red represent modified, created and accessed dates respectively. The blue line gives a good idea
about the rate that data is being 'left behind'. The red line would be used to determine how often files are being accessed.
Determine HSM and Archiving Policies
 |
| click to view |
FileCensus has access to the raw information about every file in your network. Using the conditions page you can
'try out' the proposed HSM and Archive rules to see how much information will be moved. You can interactively refine
the rules to ensure that information that is needed is not aggressively moved to secondary storage. This will ensure
that the archiving hardware is not overused and access to the users information is not adversely impacted.
