Launching what it called an ILM initiative, HP said that initially it will target the financial services and healthcare industries who have been most affected by recent regulatory changes. This is not just to be another voice in the market. It’s important to articulate our strategy. ILM is a long-term activity, and customers want assurance that we have a strategy, said HP’s ILM director Rusty Smith.
That strategy involves offering tailored ILM services that will involve HP’s existing products with technology from third party archiving and HSM suppliers including Avamar, CommVault, Ixos, KVS, Legato, Mirapoint, Persist, CommVault and QStar, and a joint-marketing campaign with resellers. HP’s ILM director Rusty Smith said the company is considering assembling bundles of software and hardware to be sold by resellers. The only new technology that HP announced as part of the initiative is a point release of the company’s SAN Manager 3.1 software that adds application-specific SRM functions tailored for Microsoft Exchange, and the Oracle database. HP declined to say whether it is developing any more software of its own as part of its initiative.
ILM has emerged over the last few months as what appears to be a comprehensive term for the management of storage systems, and HP follows other suppliers such as EMC Corp in embracing it. IBM Corp has rejected ILM as nothing more than a new name for the established technology of Hierarachical Storage Management, which involves the automatic movement of data between tiers of storage device. HSM systems classify storage devices into tiers according to their performance, cost and protection levels, and continually review the age and frequency of usage of data, ensuring that as data ages or becomes less frequently used or less important it is moved off high-end storage onto more apppropriate devices in lower tiers.
According to HP however, ILM is more than a just new way of describing state-of-the-art HSM. It’s more than that. Archiving and HSM are the easy parts. Searching and retrieval of data which is being held for very long periods of time are the hard parts, said Smith. HSM is only a component of ILM, which is also about defining procedures for data replication, search and retrieval.
HP needs to partner with third-party suppliers because it has no archiving, data retrieval or regulatory compliance software of its own – unlike EMC, which is set to acquire those technologies via the purchase of Legato that it announced this summer. For HP, Smith said: We don’t feel we need to have our own stuff. We think it’s more important to offer the broadest range of solutions, said Smith. But he appeared to expose an inferiority complex when he added unprompted: We don’t think we have to buy a Legato. EMC is limiting itself by doing that. We’ll have a broader set of solutions.
According to Enterprise Storage Group analyst Steve Kenniston, no single supplier has all the components needed for ILM, although he said he considers EMC to have the best integrated story at present. Regarding HP’s effort, Kenniston said: They’re talking about the right things, and they’re picking the right partners. Time will tell about the integration.
Smith repeated HP’s already public stance concerning its willingness to continue reselling Legato software. Our future relationship with Legato depends on Legato and EMC. If they do what they say they will and keep their sales forces separate, the relationship won’t change. If they start misbehaving badly, that could change, he said. HP will be reluctant to refuse to cooperate with customers that ask it to build systems involving Legato software. As an illustration of his claim that no single supplier can offer an entire ILM system, Kenniston said that only Legato has software needed to meet regulatory requirements.
ILM systems are being built to meet requirements of regulations such as HIPPA which demand that some data is retained for thirty years. Will customers be happy about building such long-term systems using third-party software which in some cases is supplied by what are only start-ups businesses that could easily disappear in the mid-term? We have access to our partners’ source code, and could carry on supporting it, and help migrate customers over to new systems. There are no big leaders. In archiving and HSM it’s just a bunch of little guys.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
