In an ideal world, every single piece of information you ever needed would be available instantly. But that wouldn’t be particularly cost-effective and such a system – if it could even be constructed – would be a nightmare to back up and maintain.

Managing the transparent flow of information onto appropriate media so that it can be accessed when and where needed is the premise of information lifecycle management (ILM), a discipline related to, but sitting above, storage. Why should customers do ILM? Simon Jeggo, information manager at IBM Software Group, says that if you don’t do some form of information management, storing data becomes very expensive.