No Such Thing as Delete: Information Lifecycle Management

摘要

Increasingly stringent government regulations have left many storage administrators afraid to use the Delete key. Regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and HIPAA require companies to keep more data than they ever have before, which has led to a new surge in storage capacity. It has also led to a data management nightmare. Not even the most deep-pocketed companies can afford to keep all data on expensive primary storage, but many of them are nervous about storing relatively fresh off-line, for fear they could not get to it in time to fulfill regulatory demands. This need to manage data from creation through retirement (a word that's replacing deletion) has given rise to Information Lifecycle Management. ILM is a process (not a single application) that matches data to its optimal storage media at different points in the data's lifecycle. It encompasses storage strategies instead of narrow approaches, and can include storage, retention, management and retrieval. In addition, it contains methodologies for optimizing the storage targets to data's criticality, regulatory impact and age. For example, a newly created piece of data would sit on its server's primary storage array. As the data ages, migration software automatically tracks its age and tags it for secondary storage migration. Another process might direct the data onto online ATA disk or directly to a tape library and off-site vaults.