Information lifecycle management is a set of rules organized into a policy. The rules determine how an object’s data is protected from loss over time.
ILM rules define:
- The location of object data
- The type of storage used
- The type of loss protection applied to an object’s data
- The number of copies made
- The changes over time to an object's location, storage, and loss protection
Information lifecycle management settings are implemented through an ILM policy that is made up of ILM rules. Every object ingested into the system is evaluated against the ILM policy and its ILM rules. ILM rules use an object’s metadata to filter an object and determine what actions to take in storing and copying the object’s data. For details about configuring ILM rules and policies, see the information about administering StorageGRID Webscale.
The following figure shows an ILM policy whose ILM rule determines the following:
- When an object is ingested (day zero):
- Two replicated copies are stored at Site 1 on disk (Storage Nodes), providing local network latency access to this data.
- One erasure-coded copy is distributed among Sites 1 through 3 on disk (Storage Nodes), providing storage-efficient protection against site failure.
- At the end of Day 14, the two replicated copies on disk at Site 1 are deleted.
For example, some users might only require local network latency access to the data for the first 14 days.
