ACE: Classification for information lifecycle management

One of the principal problems in Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is to align the business value of data with the most cost-effective and appropriate storage infrastructure. In this paper, we present ACE: a framework of tools for ILM, that classifies data and storage resources, and generates a data placement plan for informed utilization of the available storage resources in the system. The goal of ACE is to design a data placement plan that provides cost benefits to an organization while allowing efficient access to all important data. To achieve this goal, ACE uses a policy-based approach to classify data and storage based on the metadata attributes and hardware capabilities respectively. The main advantage of using ACE is that it enables appropriate usage of under-utilized storage systems without extensive human intervention. Another key characteristic of ACE is that it uses a policy-based architecture to automate the process of data valuation and storage classification.