Yesterday I had lunch with Legato’s George Symons. He’s their CTO. After chatting about the weather and basic stuff about the impending EMC/Legato merger we dove into information lifecycle management (ILM) – a topic of interest to both Legato and EMC. In fact, just last week at a financial analyst day in New York, EMC’s CEO too spoke about ILM.If you don’t know the term (err… buzz word), that’s ok. I’ll explain. It seems the definition today is a set of software solutions needed to manage data from its conception to death. Not surprisingly, Legato and EMC are talking about developing a single software suite that combines many of the processes involved- creation, organizing, protecting, replicating, accessing, archiving and destroying. Symons believes the listed functions would remain as modular software components, yet each piece would treat metadata the same way. That doesn’t exist today. And according to Symons, EMC is at work to fix that. The solution then is a collection of tightly integrated software components that share a common way to describe data. They would then report up to a storage resource management product like EMC’s ControlCenter. Of course all of this will come to together much faster for EMC given the two companies have very little overlap in terms of products, or so Symons believes. 😉 I was pleased to hear Symons acknowledge that a modular approach is required as customers are not interested in replacing their various applications used for dif-ferent tasks. And that means third-party products could too report up to a storage management platform. I was even more pleased when he brought up the word- standards. Symons seemed pretty certain standards to define a common way to de-scribe data and a way to index the stored data will evolve in the next year to 18 months. The indexing part is pretty interesting too, given that a complete solution would allow a storage administrator or user to search ALL stored data, be it in a da-tabase or as a file. This requires the creation of an index engine that can identify and list the location of both structured and unstructured data.The first standard would describe the file size, name, ownership, location, and time stamps (the last two being the most important to ILM). The second standard would make it possible to index stored data in a way that users could search the data stores. Again the goal of all of this is to make it possible to access all storage, in any stage of its life, from a single point. I’m eager to see what will come of this and when. Let me know if you know of anyone else working on this or something similar. Technology Industry