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ILM: rest in peace
3 comments- IT TOPICS:Business Intelligence, Storage
One of the most misguided computer industry marketing initiatives ever is coming to a slow and shuddering halt. People just don't have time for nonsense. Sadly, Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is particularly seductive nonsense. It has taken far too long for practitioners to see past the vendor's honeyed words.
As I noted over at StorageMojo.com, the good folks at StorageNetworking.org have raised a red flag over ILM in three reports: Information Lifecycle Management in Perspective: Initial Findings From Surveys of Top Management , Information Lifecycle Management: An Analysis of End User Perspectives and ILM Survey: What Storage, IT and Records Managers Say. Each is the product of their own independent research.
The results are, IMHO, pretty damning, especially three years into a major industry marketing program. In short (and I highly recommend looking at the research yourself if you are considering an ILM project or are in the middle of one): there is no definition of ILM; people believe ILM can create more problems than it solves; and a general concern that technology is being thrown at a soft problem.
The Bastard Child of Opportunism and Necessity
Born in the still-smoking rubble of the dot-bomb aftermath, mid-wifed by EMC's powerhouse marketing, ILM was intended to return EMC to the halcyon days of Y2K, when F1000 glass houses were buying TimeFinder and Syms like popcorn. In 2001 EMC had forecast FY03 sales of $12 billion and instead booked about $6.2 billion, one of the most startling industry u-turns since Osborne Computer imploded. Battered and bloody, a drowning EMC sent forth its sales legions and camp followers to spread the good news: ILM is here and will save your bacon. They actually meant "our bacon".
ILM = I Like Money
It is an important function of marketing to help practitioners create a story that gives direction and meaning to their work. Most IT folks live in an interrupt-driven world and don't have near enough time to step back and figure out the strategic initiatives. Good marketers listen hard to their customers, look at the technology and business trends affecting all businesses, and find the sweet spots where it is a win-win for customer and vendor alike. ILM failed to meet that standard. By embracing it, EMC in particular let the entire storage industry down. Oh, and thousands of customers. So when you hear "ILM" think "I Like Money". That is what it is all about.
Why ILM Failed
Some note that ILM is simply Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) with a new coat of paint. HSM has never taken off outside some narrow niches because it has never been able to compete with the rapidly dropping price of storage. Most folks would rather spend $250,000 to solve today's problem rather than tomorrow's. And today's problem is usually "we're running out of capacity and IOPS."
Others point to technology problems for ILM's demise, which is valid: products to auto-magically classify and migrate data are still not here three-plus years later. Yet if that were the only problem there would be hope.
In my view, the largest problem is organizational: ILM assumes that IT "owns" the data when, in fact, IT is the custodian. So we get hand-waving about "working with business units, the end-users" and so on. Sounds good, until you try it. The business units don't want to work with IT to classify their data. They don't care about IT's storage problems. They want to keep all the data they might need and they want it whenever they want it.
The thought balloon over the business-unit manager's head is "my people classify the data and IT saves money I'll never see." Uh-huh. We'll get right on that. Next!
There are niche cases where ILM may be feasible and economic. Project-based organizations, where the projects have completion and closure, such as direct mail houses, media production, research projects and the like, may benefit by shuffling completed projects off to a big JBOD and an archive. The data is classified by the project it is associated with, while there is limited need to access it once the project is "in the can".
ILM Makes Sense to Vendors
For vendors, ILM is a wonderful strategy.
That's because the only reason to have tiered storage, HSM or ILM is because the primary storage is too costly to use for everything. As Jim Gray, another all-around really smart guy at Microsoft Research said in a must-read interview “The two things that are going to be real shifts in storage are tertiary storage going online so there is no distinction; and intelligent storage, so that we raise the level above SCSI.” What Jim is saying is now that disks are as cheap as tape, the role of tape libraries will be absorbed by disks. So the storage taxonomy will be: fast disks for databases; slow cheap disks for everything else. What does ILM mean in a two tier, application driven infrastructure? Nothing, that's what.
So the more practitioners spend on ILM, the more they enable vendors to keep selling complex and expensive storage. And since it is unlikely that the ILM project will meet the its unrealistic goals, it's a loss for the customer both ways.
ILM As A Marketecture
Even Dave Hitz, a co-founder of NetApp, wrote in his blog ILM is about everything; therefore ILM is about nothing. Dave identifies several areas of confusion, the biggest ". . . is that EMC took the idea of ILM and decided to use it to explain everything that they do. At EMC, everything is about ILM." I agree with Dave. And as such, it is the largest single storage marketing misfire since Ellen Hancock kept IBM from building RAID systems in the mid-1990's.
The Array Industry vs. The Storage Industry
Business history is full of instances where entrenched companies dismissed competing technologies: Western Union refusing to buy Bell Telephone; railroads ignoring trucking; 8-inch disk vendors not investing in 5.25" disks. The array industry has forgotten it is in the business of providing cost-effective data storage. That may not always mean storage arrays.
The RAID concept galvanized the industry, just as 16-bit minicomputers once did. Yet just as the need for mini-computers passed with the rise of microprocessors, standard shared-cache storage arrays will not be the preferred model for massive storage in ten years. They aren't at Google and Amazon. If your enterprise IT has to compete with them - and if it isn't today, wait a year - you won't want to try from a high-cost infrastructure.
So in the failure of ILM there is an opportunity to get the industry to start focusing on what customers really want: storage that provides cost-effective, reliable performance and availability. Not excuses to buy over-priced and over-hyped products that overshoot most customer requirements.
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