Storage Toolkit

Dicing with data

Ed Frauenheim CNET News.com

Published: 14 Jan 2004 16:35 GMT

Joe Tucci has been awfully busy of late.

As chief executive of EMC, he has been steering his company beyond its origin as a maker of data-storage gear. In July, EMC announced it would acquire storage-software company Legato. In October, the company agreed to buy Documentum, which makes content-management software.

And just a few weeks ago, EMC announced plans to acquire software company VMware, in a move that could let Tucci's company reach further into the world of utility computing.

As EMC becomes more software-focused, a key piece of its strategy centres on so-called information lifecycle management. Tucci has trumpeted this concept of more-efficient data storage, as have competitors such as Hewlett-Packard and StorageTek. CNET News.com recently talked to Tucci about what information lifecycle management means, and how the company aims to stand out from the pack.

Q: You have talked a lot about information lifecycle management lately. What does it mean and how does it differ from what happens now with data storage? A: You have a lot of choices now in storage. You have your high-end storage, you have your midtier storage, you have midtier storage with ATA drives in them -- which drop the cost -- and of course, there is low-end storage. There is NAS (network attached storage). Of course there's still tape. What ILM (information lifecycle management) does is basically offer you a tiered approach. How valuable is this information? What kind of performance do you need? Where is the best place for storing it, the lowest cost that meets your requirements?

The second element of it is the information needs to be protected. And therefore if you can put up with a long recovery time, you can take the data that's on disk and back it up on tape. If it is a very mission-critical set of information, you might want to do a disk replica; you may want to have an in-the-same-array disk replica; you may want to have a remote disk replica. We can take other kinds of data that are still very important to the enterprise and back it up using ATA technology -- much much more reliable, much much faster than tape. It gives you a quicker recovery obviously. And then, of course, you still have the tape option.

Then, of course, the value of information changes over time and there's the whole question of how do you put your information from a high-end storage to midtier storage to ATA storage to, say, Centrea fixed-content storage with immutability? There is a whole aspect here of data mobility. The second piece is data protection and data mobility.

And then the third layer is the central place to manage it all. That is what makes up information lifecycle management. So you can dial in the protection that you need.