The latest AIT Forum meeting highlighted the theme: "Information Lifecycle Management and Tape Storage". This meeting was the second in the Forum focus on issues facing storage and IT managers. Click here for the summary of the AIT Forum meeting on Regulatory Compliance Regulatory Meeting Notes.

Leading storage industry and regulatory experts were invited to explore today's information lifecycle management (ILM) realities, point out the implications for storage, discuss applications standards and solutions, and highlight trends and future developments.

Dianne McAdam, senior analyst and partner with Data Mobility Group (www.datamobilitygroup.com), discussed ILM's architecture of hardware, software, services, processes and management - much more than just hierarchical storage management. ILM fits very well into the era of the appliance, both with disk-to-disk appliances offering continuous backup, compression and regulatory appliances offering worm support and email archiving. Tape can provide offsite protection, an extra level of security, and a more cost effective and environmentally friendly solution than disk. Specialized compliance disk based appliances offer a more expensive option to tape, but tape's low cost, high capacity media offers archival storage, compliance and WORM support.

Steve O'Grady, senior analyst and partner at RedMonk (www.redmonk.com), discussed ILM and applications. ILM will become reality when applications meet storage. Applications alone cannot guarantee functions like WORM. ILM is too broad for any single vendor, and service/applications/training partnerships are key to success. Application vendors need storage vendors, for without hardware and software functionality, ILM cannot move forward.

Michael Peterson, Program Director, SNIA Data Management Forum (DMF), (www.snia.org/dmf/), discussed the relationship between data management and ILM and the DMF's vision for Information Lifecycle Management. ILM spans the datacenter, and includes more than storage. ILM will provide a management and control framework for the data center through business processes that begin by setting business goals for the operation of applications and information services. These goals are abstracted and transformed into polices implemented in the network, computer and storage infrastructures, and executed through data management and information management services.

Four AIT Forum partners presented their views on the role of ILM with tape technology.

Mike Palermo, Senior Product Marketing Manager at ADIC, outlined the challenges IT managers face in an environment where data volumes are growing 50% - 60% annually, outpacing declines in disk costs and IT productivity improvements, and dominating IT spending. ILM implemented in a "tiered hardware approach" often results in islands of ILM where organizations find their storage infrastructures are often replicated, multiple ways exist to manage data, and it is difficult to integrate new technologies. ADIC's customers are incorporating the ADIC StorNext file system solution as an approach to eliminate these ILM islands.

Chris Stone, VP of Sales and Marketing at Breece Hill, discussed how ILM addresses customer's data management concerns, providing easy, inexpensive management of data, data accessibility based on workflow needs, and overhead reduction of storage specific data on the most cost effective medium. Breece Hill's iStoRA information storage and retrieval architecture, which incorporates AIT, offers a new approach to meet the data storage needs of small to medium businesses.

Nick Harper, VP Business Development at Spectra Logic Corporation discussed the need for ILM and how tape fits into ILM. Because ILM deals with long retention, high volume, relatively low access frequency, and value per byte of data - tape today is the solution that best addresses these needs. In an ILM scenario, data value vs. storage cost is paramount, and tape provides the lowest cost at large data sizes. Tape's cost/MB advantage widens as total storage increases. In addition, tape's sequential structure, while limiting its performance as an online access medium, offers an advantage in many longer-term archival applications.

Phil Storey, CEO of XenData (www.xendata.com), focused on the requirements for reference information and how ILM addresses those needs. The rapid growth in reference information is generated by a variety of applications, including document imaging, email, high volume ERM, medical imaging, video archives and satellite imagery. Storey discussed how the XenData Archive Series Software approaches reference information management via RAID and SAIT/AIT tape for archival and retrieval. Tape combined with RAID provides an affordable solution that combines disaster recovery, compliance best practices and ILM.