Focus Areas » Information Lifecycle Management

Information Lifecycle Management

Information lifecycle management (ILM) is a sustainable storage strategy that balances the cost of storing and managing information with its changing business value. A well-executed ILM strategy will result in a more agile organization, reduce business risk, and drive down both storage unit and storage management costs. Ultimately, organizations gain solid and immediate business benefit from information lifecycle management by better controlling information assets for competitive advantage.

What is ILM?  The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), working with a cooperative initiative of systems integrators and industry leaders, has developed an industry definition for ILM -- a strategic vision based on open standards:

“Information Lifecycle Management is comprised of the policies, processes, practices, and tools used to align the business value of information with the most appropriate and cost-effective IT infrastructure from the time information is conceived through its final disposition. Information is aligned with business requirements through management policies and service levels associated with applications, metadata, and data.”

ILM is a management process that requires planning and decision making, inside and outside of IT. Although the approach to ILM may come from different perspectives, all in the industry agree that the need to deploy ILM solutions is becoming more and more urgent.

The pressing need for ILM is being driven from several directions: rising costs, compliance requirements, legal support, Enterprise Content Management, and the need to maximize the bottom line.  But implementation of ILM must be based on a comprehensive strategy.  This strategy has three critical areas:  a data lifecycle management (DLM) infrastructure, security, and integration.

Crescent Enterprise Solution has the necessary experience, expertise, and resource together with tools and methodologies to help you achieve a more complete ILM strategy.

Crescent comprehensive DLM solution – Crescent Enterprise Solutions delivers OS, servers, storage systems, NAS appliances, SAN infrastructure devices such as tape and switches, and storage software for management, back up, and recovery.  All integrated, tested, and proven.

Crescent comprehensive Security and Identity Management solution – Secure infrastructure requires authentication, access, and containment.  Our solutions stack with identity management provide a world class, enterprise level security platform.

Crescent Integration - Our experience as a technology integrator enables us to provide the seamless integration of systems and software to make ILM a reality. Our experts can review an organization’s needs regarding security, content management, and compliance requirements and provide the right infrastructure to support those needs, as well as the policy-based automation required to move information transparently between different tiers of storage, based on relevance. We offer pre-built, ready-to-deploy systems that include everything from the OS to servers, disk storage, tape libraries, software, and services. The reduced time to deployment afforded by these systems helps increase ROI and maximizes business opportunities. Our solution line is supported by professional services and support teams with a depth of experience that enables them to customize storage solutions for every customer environment--from small organizations to large Fortune 500 enterprises. In addition, with our commitment to open we can deliver integrated, customized solutions featuring best-in-class products and technologies to match your business needs.

A fast, simple way to get started with ILM for your business is to implement one of Sun’s “ILM-ready” solutions, such as Sun's Content Infrastructure Solution or the Sun StorEdgeTM Compliance Archiving
System.

Crescent ILM-ready Solutions
In order to help our customers get started with ILM Crescent Enterprise Solutions utilizes “pre-packaged” solutions.

Content Infrastructure System
Designing, developing, and deploying a comprehensive content management system can be complex, time-consuming, risky, and expensive. To help simplify and streamline the process, Crescent utilizes Sun Content Infrastructure system--a cost-effective solution that addresses the full range of data management issues, including backup and restore, business continuity, media management, archive policies, asset management, and more. The system is a fully assembled, tested, configured, multi-tiered platform that enables organizations to accelerate the deployment of an ILM strategy. It integrates easily with partner offerings and features WORM functionality as well as the choice of FC or SATA disk. This solution reduces the cost and complexity of content management and secure compliance, and provides organizations with a highly available, fully redundant system that's easy to use, ready to deploy, and simple to manage.

Compliance Archiving System
Crescent utilizes Sun StorEdge Compliance Archiving System to store and protect vital data assets to reduce risk, help ensure regulatory compliance, and increase competitive advantage. Typically installed in 15 minutes or less, the system combines the Sun StorEdge 5310 NAS appliance and Sun StorEdge Compliance Archiving software to create a NAS “lockbox” that helps protect your business and mitigate risk very quickly and cost-effectively. The system is simple to manage and supports multiple platforms, such as Microsoft Windows and UNIX. Features include software-enforced non-erasable, non-rewritable "WORM" disk and advanced security features for authenticity and integrity. Flexible configurations include options for FC or SATA disk and cluster support, to match business needs for availability, capacity, and performance. The Sun StorEdge Compliance Archiving system can be integrated with applications such as Vignette(R) Records & Documents application software to provide organizations with complete end-to-end management of assets such as documents, emails, and images from the capture/ingestion stage through archival retention and ultimately disposition based on business processes and policies. An organization's entire content can be captured and managed on a day-to-day basis in accordance with business processes and accessed anywhere, anytime via secure Web access. Assets are transferred automatically to a storage archiving system, such as the Sun StorEdge Compliance Archiving System, which provides long-term record retention with guaranteed content authenticity. This enables organizations to continue to improve the efficiency and responsiveness of their processes while meeting increasingly stringent regulatory obligations.