Today's business requires data to be protected and available 24*7

Data centres achieved this goal with appropriate use of storage infrastructure

So, ILM is a proactive strategy that enables an IT organization to effectively manage the data through out its life cycle, based on predefined business policies.

Characteristics of ILM are as follows

Business-centric- It should be integrated key processes, applications & initiatives of the business to meet both current & future growth in information.

Centrally managed- All the information assets of a business should be under the purview of the ILM strategy

Policy-based- ILM should be implemented as a policy & encompass all business applications, processes of resources.

Heterogeneous- An ILM strategy should take in to account all types of storage platforms & operating systems.

Optimized- ILM strategy should consider the different storage requirements & allocate storage resources based on the information's value to the business.

Four Activities of ILM as follows

1.Classifying: data & applications on the basis of business rules & policies to enable differentiated treatment of information.

2.Implementing: policies by using information mgmt tools, starting from the creation of data & ending with its disposa

3.Managing: Use integrated tools to reduce operational complexity

4.Organizing: Based on the information's current value store resource with data classes in the right type of infrastructure.

Benefits

1. Improved utilization- By using tired and storage platforms & increased visibility of all enterprise information

2. Simplifed management- By integrating steps & interfaces with individual tools, thus increase automation

3. A Wider range of options- for back up and recovery to balance the need for business continuity

4. Maintaining compliance- By knowing what data needs to be protected for what length of time.

5. Lower total cost of ownership (LTO)- 1) By aligning the infrastructure & management costs with information value.2) As a result, resources are not wasted & complexity is not introduced by managing low value data at the expense of high value of data.