Information lifecycle management

Research opportunities

Managing business information has become increasingly difficult. The amount of digital information is growing exponentially at the same time that requirements for how information is handled are changing at a dizzying pace.

In addition to government regulations, such as the U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act, businesses must consider corporate document classification and legal discovery policies in determining how and where documents are stored, who has access, what may be edited or printed, how long information must be retained, and when it must be deleted.

Complicating matters further is the fact that both the way information is used and its business value vary over time; as a consequence, requirements for performance, availability, reliability, and privacy of the underlying storage system must change as well.

To manage that, businesses are increasingly turning to multi-tier storage systems that provide differently priced levels of performance and availability according to the value of the information being stored.

Research focus

Current work

Research focus areas include:

• automating file classification based on data mining techniques, file access patterns, and semantic techniques
• specifying information management requirements from multiple sources, including the usage of information as described in the business process
• translating high-level requirements into choices for the appropriate underlying storage tiers
• monitoring the storage system to detect and correct violations of these requirements

HP contributes to industry-wide storage management practices through its involvement in the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and is involved in work to establish standards for the fast-growing area of information lifecycle management.

Technical contributions

HP Labs' research in storage and data mining has contributed to HP products such as the Reference Information Storage System, a records-management and archiving solution for e-mail, file and database objects. We expect to contribute even more broadly to HP’s information and storage management products.

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