Intel Faces ILM Challenge

Despite efforts from vendors such as EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) to drive information lifecycle management (ILM) to the next level, some organizations are still wrestling with the realities of the technology, according to execs at the Storage World Conference this week. (See EMC Intros IIM.)

The idea behind ILM, of course, is that users can quickly shift their data between different storage media based on its importance. But in order to move all this data around to various levels of storage, it must first be classified -- no easy undertaking in many organizations. (See Users Cite ILM Shortfalls, Quicken Loans Advances With EMC, and Warner Bros..)

One panelist at this week's show, Mike Johnsen, manager of IT data management services at Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC), says data classification is a major hurdle to ILM. "We don't have an ILM strategy right now," he explained during a panel discussion yesterday. "We really need to get buy-in from our [internal] customers. They need to get in there and classify their data."

Johnsen, who manages storage for all of Intel's IT operations, says his company already has a multi-tier storage architecture in place. It is part of an overall storage infrastructure that represents about 2 Pbytes of data spread across 24 sites in nine countries. Data is growing at a rate of 40 percent annually, he says. And still users aren't easily persuaded to classify their data.

"The feedback that I get from [end users] is that it's easier to throw money at disk than to assign headcount to really fix the problem," Johnsen asserted.