Policy Driven
ILM aims to achieve two things. To reduce risk by storing your data in a compliant way; to reduce costs by storing data on appropriate media according to the data’s perceived value or activity profile. ILM is a business policy supported by an IT process linked to an underlying physical architecture aligned to the businesses needs.
Data Classes
For many organisations, compliance is still addressed by storing everything forever. Whilst data residency is given two choices – ride first class on Maglev or fester in the sidings with the cattle. As data volumes have grown and its content increased in value, this is neither an economic or effective data management strategy.
Union helps its customers resolve this conundrum in an objective and cohesive manner. We start by helping you establish corporate policy with respect to data retention by talking to the business. Together we then define data classes – types of data defined by structure type, owner, application, etc.
Service & Storage Alignment
Service Classes according to retention, activity, performance, availability, and protection are then aligned to each Data Class. Each Service Class is aligned to a Storage Class which has an appropriate cost model, scale, and functional design aligned to the corporate retention policy and resident data "value". Hey presto – you have a tiered storage infrastructure aligned to business need onto which you layer data movement and management tools that provide the process to impose your corporate governance and compliance policy.
Tiered Storage
The number of tiers can be few or many. Technology can range from solid state to tape, and take the form of direct attach, SAN attach, NAS, MAID, smart, dumb, content addressable, and so on. What’s best for you and your unique requirements is what’s important.
We Do It
This is bread and water for Union. We’ve been in the ILM game since its infancy as Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM). It is innate to all our projects many of which are kicked off with an Assessment Services that can be holistic or specific to file systems, email, or data duplication.