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 it 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.


Instead, HP believes ILM applies across a company’s complete data
collection. Smith said recently passed regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley
for the financial industry and HIPAA for healthcare have necessitated more
defined 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 which 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 noted 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 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.

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