Modeling Information Lifecycle Management
Lars Arne Turczyk, Nicolas Liebau · Journal of the Association for Information Systems · 2007
Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is a strategic concept for storage of information and documents.ILM is based on the idea that in an enterprise different information have different values.Valuable information is stored on systems with a high quality of service (QoS).The value changes over time and therefore migration of information is required to cheaper storage systems with a lower QoS.Automated migration makes ILM dynamic.Such automation requires storage systems to understand what files are important at what time so that right policies can be applied.In this point ILM nowadays lacks methods and tools.In this paper we describe the modeling of a simulator for Information Lifecycle Management (ILM).The objectives are determined verbally and the related assumptions are specified.The model is implemented into a simulator, which allows dynamic ILM considerations.90% of decision makers consider implementing ILM (Linden 2006) but there are too few experience reports and experimenting and researching in real systems are too expensive.This paper addresses this issue and contributes to supporting and assisting IT managers in their decision-making process.The simulative approach has two advantages.First, it offers predictions about the long-term dynamic behaviour of an ILM scenario.Second, it dispenses with real storage hardware which allows comparing architectural design alternatives.The first simulation results focus on a reasonable number of hierarchies in ILM scenarios.The results raise the awareness of the required number of hierarchies and the choice of storage technologies.They help to avoid mismanagement and poor investments in advance.This shows that the simulator is a useful tool for design of ILM solutions.Together with other tools like TCO-calculators it supports the decision process of IT managers.