Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Taming the storage lion

October 29, 2004 | Comments: (0)

Taming the storage lion

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Though he never said it, at times Mike Peterson must have felt a bit like Siegfried and Roy. Perhaps Roy in particular. Peterson is program director for the Storage Network Industry Association and charged with developing standards for Information Lifecycle Management. That sounds harmless enough if one were developing a standard in a vacuum. Peterson and the SNIA are not. ILM has become a primary point of contention and competition among storage heavyweights like EMC, IBM, Hitachi and Hewlett-Packard, as well as a slew of smaller companies that want in on the action. Peterson got to work with all those companies and more in hammering out a definition and a white paper on ILM concepts. It must have felt like lion taming at some point.

Though the concept of ILM has been around for a while, without any standard definitions, ILM had basically been a marketing concept more than a technology or, to use Peterson's words, management practice.

To their credit, the major heavyweights in the storage industry are supporting the SNIA's work. Though Microsoft is not yet on board, Peterson said he expects a statement of support from Redmond in the near future.

Turning ILM into a management practice will be a key to its success and perhaps the success of the storage industry over the next few years. Making ILM a management practice means the concept is more than just a marketing ploy. It also gives IT managers a way to measure vendor claims about ILM and to sell the concept to upper management. That may not be easy either, but at least the SNIA has done some of the hard work - taming the lions - already.

Posted by Bob Francis on October 29, 2004 10:54 AM

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