30 minute interview

“The complexity of implementing ILM has increased manifold”

Amit Pandey vice president & general manager, Nearline & Content Delivery, Network Appliance, Inc

Network Appliance is bullish about the ILM market and is working on developing new products to target this space.

*There’s a lot of hype around Information Lifecycle Management(ILM). Does a market exist for this technology?

The concept of ILM has been around for a while, but the complexity of implementing ILM has increased manifold. There has been a substantial increase in the quantum of data being generated by organisations. Implementing ILM is a major policy decision and has become very complex as it needs to involve every department in the organisation. CIOs of an organisation, who wish to go in for ILM have to justify the allocation of storage to different departments. To properly allocate storage, a CIO has to spend time with the departmental heads and detail the kind of data that each department generates and how critical it is for the organisation. Arriving at conclusions in such situations can be a challenging task. Therefore, storage vendors work to lessen the complexity faced by organisations adopting ILM.

*Why would an organisation deploy an ILM solution?

Cost is the single most important driving force for an organisation that wishes to adopt ILM. Organisations cannot afford to keep non-critical data or stale data on expensive primary storage for a long time and need to shift to secondary storage. CIOs are hard-pressed to utilise primary storage in an optimal manner as their budgets are limited and they cannot keep going in for new storage solutions. Secondly, the demand for higher performance stops CIOs from placing too many non-critical applications on primary storage as this can bring down the performance of business critical applications, slowing down the access and retrieval of information. Lastly, organisations need to adopt ILM to adhere to regulations.

*Is India a mature market in terms of ILM deployment? Will international regulations have an impact on implementations?

Although regulatory compliance is a relatively new area in the Indian market, in the US there are three important regulations namely—the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and SEC 17 a-4. These regulations are forcing organisations to craft an ILM strategy. Compliance is also going to directly or indirectly affect the Indian companies. For instance, any Indian company trading on a US securities exchange has to follow SEC 17 a-4 (by this regulation all companies trading on a US securities exchange have to maintain their records regarding trades for seven years and the data has to be stored on undeletable storage). Any company incorporated in the US that has offices in India will also be affected by US regulations. There are many Indian companies dealing directly with US-based firms and they too need to maintain the same level of standards that is prescribed for their US partners by regulatory bodies. At present, adoption is fairly low in India. The influx of MNCs and adoption by government agencies such as banks will drive ILM adoption in India.

*What are the products NetApp is brining into the market in 2005?

We are in the process of developing a new product that is code-named ILM dialer. We will launch it before the end of 2005. This dialer will sit beside the filer and help organisations shift data from primary to secondary storage. We also have a product SnapLock (WORM) on which data, once stored, cannot be deleted and is read only. Through this we intend to target financial services, energy and pharma. Our NearStore products have recorded steady sales during the last two years.

Abhinav Singh