Storage is from Mars, Information is from Venus

I’m not going to bore you with another introduction to Information Lifecycle Management. Odds are you’ve already read one of the dozens of articles that have appeared in major storage industry publications.

While the term Information Lifecycle Management is relatively new, many of the underlying concepts have been with us for quite some time. Most notable is the idea of managing information from inception to deletion, an idea central to the ILM philosophy, which has existed as part of the document/content/digital asset management¹mantra for well over ten years.

Storage is from Mars, Information is from Venus

Prior to 2000, storage vendors and content management vendors lived on two different planets (the one noteworthy exception is IBM and its Content Manager product introduced in 1994).²

I’ll spare you the history lesson—let’s just zoom ahead to the past three years. What has evolved are storage management products with mediocre information management functionality, and content management products with mediocre storage management functionality—the result of two separate industries (each lacking the others’ expertise) approaching similar data/information management issues from two completely different perspectives.