HP Makes Information Lifecycle Management Official

HP made a strategy that has been gaining momentum in the storage industry a formal program Wednesday with the announcement of its Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) initiative for guiding data from cradle to grave.

Sensing that ILM has increasingly become a buzzword since federal regulations have become more stringent, HP has become the first major vendor to fashion a true program, with all apologies to EMC, which brought it further into the public’s consciousness when the company purchased Legato Systems.

Rusty Smith, HP’s director of ILM, told internetnews.com that HP is taking a more holistic approach to ILM than such vendors as EMC, VERITAS, and IBM. While he claims EMC and VERITAS treat ILM as a storage-oriented issue, Smith said IBM focuses on hierarchical storage management (HSM) and is lacking some pieces for a full ILM offering. Conversely, HP sees ILM as a function of overall business processes in an enterprise.

HP believes ILM applies across a company’s complete data collection. Smith said recently passed regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act for the financial industry and HIPAA for healthcare have necessitated more comprehensive ILM systems, which serve to align data requirements with the proper assets to manage information from the time it is created to the time it is ready to be expunged.

To serve those businesses for whom keeping up with the latest corporate reporting and records retention is of utmost importance, Smith said HP has outlined three specific areas its ILM strategy will address: data retention, management, and reference information management.

“We will show companies how to keep data long-term even as their IT environment changes,” Smith said. “Some regulations require companies to keep data such as e-mail for 30 years. Over time, you’ll have these massive data stores that have to be managed. The third issue is that now that you have the data out there, how do you get more value from the asset? That’s where we provide reference information management.”

Smith said HP has the partners in place to offer as complete an ILM suite on the planet as one can find. HP is partnering with Avamar, CommVault, IXOS, KVS, LEGATO, Mirapoint, and Persist on offering e-mail archiving solutions and services for the financial services industry to meet Sarbanes-Oxley requirements.

Meanwhile, HP is in concert with Agfa, Cerner, Eclipsys, Fuji, G.E. Medical Systems, IDX, McKesson, Meditech, Philips Medical, and Siemens to offer ILM to the healthcare industry.

HP will supply its own products, including hardware such as disk, tape, optical solutions, and industry standard servers, as well as its storage resource management software, OpenView Storage Area Manager and HP Services (HPS), in the package. Smith also emphasized the new ILM push is the latest facet of the concern’s wide-ranging Adaptive Enterprise strategy to meet changing business requirements on the fly.

While HP is focusing first on the financial services and healthcare markets, it is planning to delve into other lucrative markets such as pharmaceuticals, life sciences, and eventually even public sector customers.

Story courtesy of Internet News.

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