StorageTek talks up information lifecycle management

Pat Martin –- chairman, president and CEO at vendor StorageTek -- used an Australian briefing to talk up the benefits he saw for companies taking an information lifecycle management (ILM) approach to managing their storage.

Martin said that there had been a “storage bubble” at the end of last century, with the Y2K scare and the explosion of the dot-com industry.

Yet now it's “hard to find a CIO whose budget is growing year on year”, Martin said. “Some companies have been asked to cut their [IT] budgets by 50 percent.”

He said that chief financial officers were also getting much tougher on CIOs.

Despite this trend, Martin said that there was a growing need –- in part fuelled by compliance requirements –- for businesses to store more information for longer.

Martin spoke of ILM as one way companies could respond to their growing storage demands.

In its annual report StorageTek describes ILM as a way of helping companies manage “the flood of information”, lower costs, and improve efficiencies in storage operations.

“There's no good reason to store less valuable, ageing information on the same storage device as more valuable, new information –- especially when a range of devices exists, and that range provides secure data storage, acceptable data recall times and different price points,” the report said.