In general, industry analysts agree that information life-cycle management (ILM) solutions are not available as product suites that can be obtained from a single vendor, and they also doubt that it will be such in the future. However, ILM should not be overlooked, and can be defined as a set of practices or processes. Such practices and products allow IT to treat data according to its usefulness or value to a business over the life span of the data. In that case, IT managers mostly would agree on the possible value of ILM, which is a way of classifying data based on varying degrees of importance to the business (such as mission-critical vs. operational). Planning and implementation of ILM can take between five and seven years, during which three steps must be completed: deployment of a tiered infrastructure, deployment of application-specific ILM, and enterprise-wide ILM. A recent study performed by TheInfoPro, to which over 100 Fortune 1000 companies responded, indicates that two thirds of participants have some level of ILM strategy in place currently or that they will implement an ILM strategy over the next few years. Many respondents are interested in tiered storage, disk-to-disk, and Serial Advanced Technology Attachment. When asked what vendors they plan to use to help them with ILM implementation, they put two storage vendors at the top of the list: EMC, followed by Veritas Software.