Stoking The Storage MachineStoking The Storage Machine

Norm Fjeldheim, CIO and senior VP at Qualcomm Inc., says he's actively pursuing information life-cycle management, rather than waiting for vendors to advance it. He'll work with all his storage partners but is leaning toward Hitachi Data Systems for hardware and Veritas for software. "We want to differentiate the data for how many times and what media we back up to," Fjeldheim says. "We have automated systems for backup but just want to do it better and more efficiently." Qualcomm couldn't wait around for outside help next year. "We've been trying some of this for years, using some of our own tools," Fjeldheim says. "Managing all the data we have now, we had to gain control so we don't continually throw money at disks."

Hitachi Data Systems plans to unveil software next year to help customers with indexing--for example, to retrieve all E-mail messages between two people for the previous seven years. "Some of the largest customers will deploy tiers of storage," predicts Claus Mikkelsen, senior director of storage apps at Hitachi.

Storage heavyweight and Hitachi competitor EMC plans to be a leader in information life-cycle management next year, says CTO Mark Lewis. "Customers don't come up and say they need ILM," he says. "But management says, 'Help us control costs, manage the information, and deal with compliance rules.'" The growth of data makes it very hard for customers to sort out retention, reuse, or archiving for compliance, Lewis says. In light of its acquisition of Documentum Inc., EMC will work hard next year toward an application-centric view of information life-cycle management, in addition to finding the lowest-cost form of media for every stage of the data life cycle, from creation to deletion. "As we look at the pure management of the element, the people cost will continue to be very high compared to the cost of the technology," Lewis says. "So we'll work to automate the environment."

HP, IBM, StorageTek, and Veritas will join EMC and Hitachi with information life-cycle-management products and strategies next year, says Jack Scott, analyst and founder of the Evaluator Group. "ILM will be the trend, and a piece of it is compliance," he says. "The other piece will be matching storage to the value of the data."

Jim Doedtman, technical planning manager at OSF Healthcare Corp., is dealing with exponential data growth in the health-care industry and fighting a battle over how much his company pays for storage. Doedtman is ready for enterprise data classification and hopes to discover what each business process--for example, a document-imaging system with dedicated cache--costs in storage. He's confident he'll have a choice of vendors; he's focused on a wide range of EMC storage systems separated by 75% in costs. "It caused us to take a hard look at ILM to have data on the right platform at the right time," Doedtman says. He says he'll start by maximizing some fixed-content data on storage that costs about 4 cents a megabyte, then move the other 80% of data to a penny-a-megabyte system.

All companies will want the right data in the right place at the right time, says Jon Benson, VP and product line manager for tape automation at StorageTek, whether it's on high-end Fibre Channel disk drives, serial ATA disk drives, or tape media--but they shouldn't lose track of what remains paramount. "Consolidation and standardization will continue to be big in '04," he says. "While customers turn multiple data centers into one, and they peel the onion on consolidation, 24-by-7 operations are what matters, down to the last copy in the ILM architecture."