ILM: ignore it at your peril

Every new transaction and every new customer adds to the mounting pile of data stored by most organisations. The cost of IT grows with this data and only organisations truly embracing Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) can expect to optimise it.

The amount of data stored by Australian and New Zealand organisations grows by at least 40 percent compound per annum, according to an internal study conducted by HP in 2006. So, if you’re storing 10 terabytes (10TB) today, in a year’s time you’ll have to manage at least 14TB, and 20TB or more in two years.

Data growth isn’t the problem, it often reflects the growth and success of the business. The problem is a lack of proper management, leading to overinvestment in storage and other business costs.

Faced with exponential growth in the amount of data they are storing, organisations react in three different ways:
1. Buying enough high-availability storage to hold all data, regardless of cost
2. Investing in tiered storage — a mix of high-availability and cheaper low-availability storage
3. Adopting Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)

Only ILM will optimise the overall cost of storage. Why? Because ILM is more than just tiered storage. ILM is a storage and data management approach that involves introducing the skills, processes and technical systems that ensure every piece of information is stored once, securely, and in the manner that provides the greatest cost benefit to the business.

Store more, buy more
Every business stores data that is not for business purposes, from university assignments to home movies to MP3s. I know a high-profile global company in Australia that stores all data, without discrimination, on high-availability storage. One of Australia’s largest financial institutions is similar. Clearly it does not make financial sense to store personal data along with business data on premium infrastructure that cost tens of thousands of dollars per terabyte.

To contain this expense, many organisations begin to adopt a tiered storage model, involving a mix of cheaper mid- and low-availability storage options. However, unless the organisation also embraces ILM when it invests in tiered storage, the following costs will still be higher than they need be.

Capital costs
These are the costs of buying new disk drives, tape drives and other storage devices and infrastructure. Part of the appeal of tiered storage is it allows you to reduce capital costs, by including cheaper forms of mid- and low-availability storage in the mix. Unless the organisation embraces ILM, its capital costs will still be higher than necessary, for two reasons.

First, every organisation stores multiple identical copies of many files. The more duplicates, the more the organisation must invest in storage. ILM, coupled with a document management solution, is key to ensuring that an organisation reduces the amount of unnecessary duplicate data it maintains.

Second, without ILM, there’s a strong risk of accidentally storing a high-value file on low-availability storage. This seems like it would save the organisation money. However, organisations must be able to access high-value files quickly. Therefore, they tend to try to reduce the risk of storing valuable files on low-availability storage by over-investing in high-availability storage — unless they have the confidence provided by ILM.

I know one Australian organisation that initially allocated data across tiered storage without using ILM. Soon, the organisation found that some of the data on the cheaper low-availability storage was critical to its success. However, in the time that elapsed, the volume of data on the high-availability storage had grown so quickly that there was no room left to move the business critical information back. This organisation had no choice other than to invest in more high-availability storage. This capital cost could have been avoided by using ILM in the first place to systematically allocate data across the storage tiers.

Operating cost
The lifetime cost of operating storage infrastructure includes everything from the cost of professional labour through to rent and electricity. As Gartner argued in Care Delivery Organizations Need Information Lifecycle Management Strategies (by Barry Runyon, 21 June 2006), “the energy, facilities and human capital costs associated with storage demand are as important a consideration as the storage purchase itself and need to be managed.” Without ILM, these operating costs can increase dramatically, for a number of reasons.

The first is that without ILM, there’s more storage to manage, increasing operating costs.

The second is that managing storage is more complicated without ILM, which increases operating costs. In the example above there was not just the capital cost of buying more infrastructure, but also the operating cost of manually managing the entire process.

Retrieval cost
Organisations store data for one reason — to retrieve it later. This cost is the number of documents that must be found in a period, multiplied by the time taken to retrieve each document, multiplied by the cost of labour.

Organisations incur retrieval costs every day — whenever their employees check an invoice or access any other document or piece of information. According to IDC’s study, The Hidden Costs of Information Work (April 2006), midsize enterprise companies waste more than US$5000 per worker per year searching for content they do not find. Reducing these costs is rarely a key performance indicator for the IT department, but it should be, as these costs are visible, measurable and predictable.

Then there are the less predictable retrieval costs. For example, performing an e-discovery during a trial or legal investigation can cost an organisation millions of dollars, depending on the investigation’s size. In a perfect world, organisations could ensure they were never investigated or involved in court cases. In the real world, the only reliable way of reducing the incredible, unpredictable cost of e-discovery is to store all data systematically in the first place. Enter ILM.

Service cost
If an employee wastes precious time trying to retrieve a customer record, their wasted labour is not the only cost to the business. Typically, a customer has also been asked to wait. In the future, they might take their business elsewhere to avoid waiting again.

Without the necessary business and technology processes, including ILM, every organisation risks disappointing its customers and damaging its reputation and bottom line.

The cost-benefit of change
On the face of it, adopting tiered storage can seem like a quick way of saving money, but unless it is matched with a move to ILM the organisation will still face far higher costs than are necessary. Tiered storage hardware alone is not enough: embracing ILM skills, processes and technical systems is what is required.
Visit HP Australia’s ILM website
(www.hp.com.au/ilm).

“ILM is more than just tiered storage.”

“Without ILM, there’s more storage to manage, increasing operating costs.”

By Paul Shaw, ILM business development manager, HP Australia