Infrastructure 2.0 on Ulitzer

Disclaimer, warning, be advised, heads up, disclosure, this post is partially for fun so take it that way.

Remember ILM, that is, Information Lifecycle Management among other meanings.

It was a popular buzzword de jour a few years ago similar to how cloud is being tossed around lately, or in the recent past, virtualization, clusters, grids and SOA among others.

One of the challenges with ILM besides its overuse and thus confusion was what it meant, after all was or is it a product, process, paradigm or something else?

That depends of course on who you talk to and their view or definition.

For some, ILM was a new name for archiving, or storage and data tiering, or data management, or hierarchical storage management (HSM) or system managed storage (SMS) and software managed storage (SMS) among others.

So where is ILM today?

Better yet, what does ILM stand for?

Well here are a few thoughts; some are oldies but goodies, some new, some just for fun.

ILM = I Like Marketing or It's a Lot of Marketing or It's a Lot of Money
ILM = It Lost its Meaning or It's a Lot of Meetings
ILM = Information Loves Magnetic media or I Love Magnetic media
ILM = IBM Loves Mainframes or Intel Loves Memory
ILM = Infrastructure Lifecycle Management or iPods/iPhones Like Macintosh

Then there are many other variations of xLM where I is replaced with X (similar to XaaS) where X is any letter you want or need for a particular purpose or message theme. For example, how about replacing X with an A for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), or a B for Buzzword or Backup Lifecycle Management (BLM), C for Content Lifecycle Management (CLM) and D for Document or Data Lifecycle Management (DLM). There are many others including Hardware Lifecycle Management (HLM), Product or Program Lifecycle Management (PLM) not to mention Server, Storage or Security Lifecycle Management (SLM).

While ILM or xLM specific product and marketing buzz for the most part has subsided, perhaps it is about time to reappear to give current buzzwords such as cloud a bread or rest. After all, ILM and xLM as buzzwords should be well rested after their break at the Buzzword Rest Spa (BRS) perhaps located on someday isle. You know about someday isle dont you? Its that place of dreams, a visionary place to be visited in the future.

There are already signs of the impending rested, rejuvenated and re branded appearance of ILM in the form of automated tiering, intelligent storage and data management, file virtualization, policy managed server and storage among others.

Ok, nuf fun for now, time to get back to work.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - StorageIO, Author "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (CRC)

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