Intelligent Information Lifecycle Management in Virtualized Storage Environments

Data or information lifecycle management (ILM) is the process of managing data over its lifecycle in a manner that balances cost and performance. The task is made difficult by data´s continuously changing business value. If done well, it can lower costs through the increased use of cost-effective storage but also runs the risk of negatively impacting performance if data is inadvertently placed on the wrong device (e.g., low performance storage or on an over-utilized storage device). To address this challenge, we designed and developed the Intelligent Storage Tiering Manager (ISTM), an analytics-driven storage tiering tool that automates the process of load balancing data across and within different storage tiers in virtualized storage environments. Using administrator-generated policies, ISTM finds data with the specified performance profiles and automatically moves them to the appropriate storage tier. Application impact is minimized by limiting overall migration load and keeping data accessible during migration. Automation results in significantly less labor and errors while reducing task completion time from several days (and in some cases weeks) to a few hours. In this paper, we provide an overview of information lifecycle management (ILM), discuss existing solutions, and finally focus on the design and deployment of our ILM solution, ISTM, within a production data center.