Cost Impacts on Information Lifecycle Management Design

Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is a strategic concept for storage of information and documents. ILM is based on the idea that in an enterprise information have different values. Information with different values are stored on different storage hierarchies. ILM offers significant potential cost savings by tiering storage and 90% of decision makers consider implementing ILM (Linden 2006). Nonetheless, there are too few experience reports and experimenting and researching in real systems are too expensive. In addition, 66% of IT managers do not have time to put together a basic cost model or a data value model for ILM projects. (Foskett 2006). This paper addresses these issues and contributes to supporting and assisting IT managers in their decision-making process. We present a cost model for ILM in an enterprise. The model is used for ILM simulations. The simulative approach has two advantages. On the one hand it offers predictions about the dynamic behaviour of an ILM scenario and, on the other hand, it dispenses with real storage hardware. The simulated results lead to design guidelines for ILM environments which help to avoid mismanagement and poor investments in advance. The results raise the awareness of the required number of hierarchies and the choice of storage technologies.