W H I T E
PA P E R
Moving Beyond Information
Life Cycle Management
Stephen Widen
Product Marketing Manager
June 2004
Executive Summary
Information life cycle management (ILM) is one of the most widely
discussed initiatives in the storage industry today. Although its definition
varies from vendor to vendor, most agree that ILM involves aligning
information, data and storage management with business use — in other
words, managing data differently at different points in time based on its
changing business value. This concept has been embraced to varying
degrees by vendors in the information technology (IT) industry, especially
by storage vendors. The hoped-for promise of ILM is increased
operational efficiencies and corresponding lower costs.
This white paper reviews ILM as it is currently understood and
outlines the vision of Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA) for
what ILM will be as it extends beyond a storage-only perspective. It also
describes the current intelligent storage management solutions offered
under CA’s BrightStor® brand and presents a road map for solutions
moving forward in the context of ILM.
The Impact of Growing Data
According to industry analysts, data is growing at a rate of 20–40% annually, and the individuals
responsible for storing and protecting that data are being asked to do so with reduced staffing and at
lower costs, while increasing service levels. Executives are now personally responsible for ensuring
that their organizations’ approaches to handling data complies with new regulations and mitigates
risk. Employees have an increasing need for immediate access to information in order to perform
their jobs. Companies often need to share data more effectively both within and outside the
organization. There is continual pressure to do more with less and at a faster rate.
In an attempt to address these issues, organizations are constantly seeking and trying new solutions
to be more efficient and productive. However, the result is often a very complex IT environment that
includes multiple hardware and software components that might not work well together.
To make information and storage management more effective and responsive, businesses need
to align the IT environment with business initiatives and make intelligent decisions that help drive the
business forward.
The Current Focus of ILM
ILM is the process of managing data from its creation to its eventual removal. From a storage perspective,
this involves moving the data through different types of storage media (for example, from disk to
tape to an offsite vault), enabling organizations to leverage the most cost-effective storage options.
Historically, data was often moved from one medium to another based primarily on its age or
how frequently it was accessed. The older or less regularly used the data, the more likely it was to
be moved to low-cost, low-performance, less-accessible systems. However, this posed problems for
organizations that needed immediate access to information that is not often used. For example,
medical records might be old or accessed infrequently, but in an emergency they must be instantly
available. A more valid way to determine where and how long to store data is based on the value of
the data to the business.
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Defining the value of a given piece of data involves many factors. How critical is the information
to the operations of the business? How important is it to have immediate access to the data? Must it
be retained for a certain period of time due to government regulations?
In addition, the value of data changes over time. For example, while an order is being
processed, the value of the associated data — the product being purchased, the shipping address of
the customer, the billing information — is high and the data must be stored on a high-performance
system that offers the best availability. However, once the order is filled, the value of that data drops
and it can be moved to a more cost-effective storage device. Conversely, if the customer later needs
warranty support, the value of the data once again rises as employees need access to historical
information about the order. As the value of a given piece of data changes over time, it must be
handled appropriately in order to minimize the costs associated with storage.
By evaluating the business value of data over time, it’s possible to create storage policies that can
be automated, thereby simplifying storage management, reducing administrative costs and the risks of
human error, increasing the efficiency of the organization and providing greater control over the data.
Currently, ILM focuses on developing a storage infrastructure in which data can be moved to
the most efficient form of storage hardware based on the value of that data at a given point in time.
As shown in Figure 1, this involves a number of different areas associated exclusively with storage
management and, in some cases, content management.
Content
Management
Archiving
HSM
Email
Archiving
Data
Mover
Data
Protection
Information,
Data,
Storage
Intelligence
Figure 1. Today’s ILM view
Expanding the Scope of ILM
While implementing ILM is an important first step in properly protecting and retaining data, truly
effective ILM must encompass more than traditional storage management. It must extend to include
other disciplines, such as asset management and security, as shown in Figure 2.
For example, to leverage a complete enterprise management solution, it’s necessary to have an
inventory of not only the storage resources available, but also other hardware and infrastructure
elements. Asset management offers both an initial assessment and an ongoing understanding of
your entire enterprise.
Likewise, while providing easy access to information is an important aspect of ILM, it’s equally
important to control that access, making sure that only authorized individuals can view or retrieve
sensitive information. Effective access management provides one of the necessary levels of security.
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Asset
Management
Security
Work Flow
Management
Content
Management
Archiving
HSM
Email
Archiving
Predictive
Analysis
Data
Mover
Data
Protection
Information,
Data,
Storage
Intelligence
Risk
Management
Chargeback
Compliance
Figure 2. Managing information assets in the future
The Road to Comprehensive ILM
CA has developed a long-term strategy that addresses not only the ILM needs of today, but provides
direction for managing information as an asset to the business in the future. This strategy enables
our customers to begin laying their ILM foundations today and build on those foundations at their
own pace, with the flexibility to choose the right solutions for their businesses.
This strategy reflects what we see as the ILM Maturity Model, as illustrated in Figure 3. There
are four levels to the model, with each higher level delivering increased alignment of IT to the needs
of the business based on information value and greater degrees of automation.
• Level 1: Storage Management and data protection were implemented in years past. They had
virtually no automation capabilities and, in most cases, were very labor-intensive and typically
reactive in nature.
The CA strategy for helping customers implement ILM and more extended solutions over
the next few years maps to Levels 2– 4 of the ILM Maturity Model and includes deliverables
along the way, as shown in Figure 4. Customers can plan for reaching this unified business and
IT goal at their own pace, taking advantage, over time, of the solutions and services offered
throughout the various levels of the ILM Maturity Model.
• Level 2: Intelligent Storage Management encompasses BrightStor intelligent storage
management solutions, as well as eTrust™ and Unicenter® products and services from CA and
our partners, all of which are available today. BrightStor provides a comprehensive offering with
integrated storage resource management, storage area network management, and backup and
restore solutions. This will give customers the knowledge, understanding and information
necessary to make the right decisions for their storage operations and businesses.
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Figure 3. ILM Maturity Model
•
•
Level 3: Business Content Management focuses on offering enhanced document and content
management, message archiving and hierarchical storage management (HSM). During this phase,
we also plan to tighten the integration of the products within the various CA brand families and
develop solution packages that are targeted toward specific industries, such as small and
medium-sized businesses, health care and financial services.
BrightStor® Document Manager is available now; other components will be delivered in the
near future.
Level 4: Unified Business and IT View leverages common services (that is, software
components that perform reusable functions across multiple management disciplines), developing
a central management database, and providing a single view of all aspects of the enterprise to
manage information intelligently, efficiently and securely, and to align these information assets
with the goals of the business.
Figure 4. CA’s Delivery of the ILM Maturity Model
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Intelligent Storage Management
Intelligent storage management is based on a storage strategy that includes a complete, integrated
and open storage management infrastructure. Since CA offers a comprehensive portfolio of
management software solutions, our approach for this phase can leverage not only storage
management solutions, but also integrated security management, infrastructure management and
other management disciplines. In addition, since virtually all CA technology is built on open industry
standards, we can manage software provided by other vendors, simplifying the management of
complex, heterogeneous environments.
Intelligent storage management is an ongoing process that entails four steps:
• Identifying key business processes and information, data, networking and storage assets
• Classifying those processes and the information, data and storage assets based on their
business value
• Defining storage policies and processes to support business requirements, and implementing
the appropriate storage management infrastructure
• Automating the defined policies and processes
The first step involves assessing what procedures and assets you currently have. This typically
includes identifying those activities that are critical to your business, the data required and generated
by those activities, and the servers and other devices available to store that data. BrightStor® SAN
Designer can help you both audit your current storage area network (SAN) and rapidly develop the
best design for your unique needs. If you need assistance with evaluating your current infrastructure,
CA Technology Services™ offers SAN assessment and optimization services based on industry best
practices that can be tailored to your particular environment.
Once the identification process is complete, you can then begin to classify what you have —
that is, evaluate the business value of your processes, data and assets. This includes ascertaining
how important particular information is to a given process, how quickly or how often the information
needs to be accessed by all members of the organization, as well as how long it needs to be
retained to comply with business needs and government regulations. Information is able to be placed
on the most cost-effective storage media with the right attributes (such as protection, security,
performance and so on) based on your assessment of its value to the business.
Figure 5. Intelligent Storage Management Process
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After you have classified your assets, you can begin to define policies and processes for
handling your information assets appropriately, based on their business value. For example, if you
determine that monthly sales reports must be immediately available to sales and marketing
executives for up to three years in order to monitor and respond to business trends, you can
establish a storage policy that supports that goal.
Finally, to help streamline operations and reduce administrative costs, you can leverage
BrightStor solutions to automatically take action based on your established policies. For example, you
can use BrightStor® Storage Resource Manager to automatically run BrightStor® ARCserve® Backup to
regularly back up high-value data.
The process of identification, classification, definition and automation is not a one-time event, but
rather a continual activity. As new business processes are added, new business data is created and
must be managed. As the value of business data changes over time, it must be handled appropriately.
Storage resources must be regularly optimized or expanded as storage needs increase, as well as
monitored for availability and performance. All this requires ongoing evaluation of your storage needs.
Throughout each step of this process, it’s also important to consider the role that other
management technologies play. Security, asset management and other disciplines are critical in
ultimately aligning all of IT — not just storage — with the business. CA can assist you in addressing
these needs through our eTrust™, Unicenter® and other solutions. By offering a comprehensive
solution, CA enables you to get the most out of all your IT assets.
Business Content Management
According to industry analysts, most business information exists in unstructured documents — word
processing files, spreadsheets, emails and so forth — and employees spend a great deal of their time
simply locating the information they need. Tracking, revising and maintaining business documents is
expensive in terms of both employee time and infrastructure overhead. Business content management
solutions enable you to efficiently manage the process of business information development.
Figure 6. Document management process
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Content management starts when a document is created and continues throughout its entire
life cycle, as shown in Figure 6. To address the needs of all these stages, content management
solutions typically support indexing (content search), check in/check out, versioning and annotations.
CA’s recently announced BrightStor Document Manager is part of our overall information and
data management strategy. This customizable, web-based application manages electronic documents
and other files from inception to archive, providing centralized storage, search facilities, version
control, automated work flow, access control and publishing capabilities.
As part of this phase, CA also plans to deliver message archiving and HSM capabilities. In
addition, integration with other critical IT disciplines, such as security and asset management, will
provide users with a more complete, enterprise-wide management view.
Unified Business and IT View
In this phase, CA will provide an integrated, business-oriented IT view of the entire enterprise in four
major areas: operations, storage, security and application life cycle, as shown in Figure 7. This will be
achieved through a set of common services and a centralized management database, which will
provide a single, integrated view of all enterprise assets.
With our all-encompassing management capabilities and intelligence mechanisms, as depicted
in Figure 7, CA’s solutions will be able to closely align IT with the business and provide the right IT
services on-demand.
Testing
Applications &
Databases
Modeling &
Construction
As
s
Business
Portfolio
Planning
People, Po
s,
li
et
MDB
Information
Life Cycle
Management
Common
Services
Op
ti m iz a ti o n
Identity
& Access
Management
Storage
Management
Se
ge
Threat
Management
c
Security
Information
Management
ity
Fi n
Desktop &
Servers
anc
Data
Availability
ia l A d m i
St
at
nis tr
Figure 7. Business-oriented IT
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io n
o
vice Support
Ser
Job
Optimization
Business
Modeling &
Requirement
ur
Op
e
Networks &
Systems
ra
Lif
e
Change,
Config. &
Metadata
Analysis,
s
cie
vice Delivery
Ser
le
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tio
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C
Intelligence
e Manageme
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S
Conclusion
With the exponential growth of business information and data, and the increasing demands being
placed on IT organizations, it’s more important than ever for companies to develop an information
asset strategy that reflects the value of business information and data, and encompasses
technologies that extend beyond the traditional focus of storage management. Once this is done, IT
organizations will be able to manage information as a valuable asset, and support business processes
intelligently and cost-effectively.
CA’s BrightStor intelligent storage management solutions meet today’s need to manage and
protect information from the laptop to the data center, from files to databases to applications. With
BrightStor solutions, customers can place the right data on the right asset at the right time with the
right level of protection and security to support their businesses. The integrated design of BrightStor
solutions also allows us to extend their capabilities in the future, making information, data and
storage management an integral part of business-focused enterprise management and enabling
business-oriented IT through managing on-demand.
With more than 28 years of management software experience and expertise, CA is uniquely
qualified and positioned to help customers achieve their business goals, now and in the years to come.
For more information, visit ca.com/brightstor
© 2004 Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA). All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. This document
is for your informational purposes only. To the extent permitted by applicable law, CA provides this document “AS IS” without warranty of any kind, including, without limitation,
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