An information life cycle management policy or an ILM policy is an ordered set of ILM rules that determines how the storage grid system manages object data over time. This is one of the most powerful features of storage grid and like any powerful feature, it requires careful planning to implement properly. Before you begin, let's understand some general guidance. An ILM policy consists of prioritized ILM rules. You'll start by selecting a default rule, which is used for objects that do not match any of the filters specified by other ILM rules. Then select additional rules to be included in the policy. Then you'll prioritize the non-default rules in a table. You can filter by object size, bucket name, and prefix, tenant name, and much more to choose which objects an ILM rule is applied to. Storage grid will apply the highest priority matching rule to ingested objects. You also want to carefully analyze all possible scenarios to ensure data isn't accidentally moved or deleted. And before activating an ILM policy, you want to use the ILM simulation to verify that the rules are behaving properly. This requires existing objects to test. Before you create an ILM policy, there are a few prerequisites you must follow. Firstly, you have to create ILM rules before creating a policy. Every ILM policy needs at least one ILM rule. Note that you can easily create or edit ILM rules while creating a policy by following a link to open the rules page in a new tab. Any changes you make in the new tab will be updated on the policies page. You also have to be sure there is no existing proposed ILM policy. If a proposed ILM policy exists, you can edit it or remove it and create a new policy from scratch. For this demo, I'm using a three-sight grid. The goals you have for your grid might include, I want ILM to store fabric pool data at a single data center and geodistribute large objects. With that goal in mind, we'll need to create, simulate, and activate an ILM policy. To create an ILM policy within the grid manager, navigate to ILM and policies. Every storage grid system requires one active ILM policy. Additionally, a storage grid system might also have one proposed ILM policy and a number of historical policies. In this storage grid system, we have one active ILM policy and several historical policies. ILM policies are maintained on this page to show audit history. As your grid changes in topology or your data requirements change, new ILM rules might be created which are not included in the active policy. As a result, you'll have to create a new active policy to include all the rules you want. This current active ILM policy called fabricpool data center 1 plus three sites replicated contains two ILM rules called keep fabric pool objects at data center 1 with EC2 plus1 and three site replicated. The goal of this policy is to store buckets with the prefix FPDC1 at data center 1 with a 2 plus one eraser coding scheme and to create three copies of all remaining data. If you click on a rule, you can see more details including the retention diagram and the filters. To create a new proposed policy, click create proposed policy and create new policy. Enter a name for the ILM policy and a reason for the change. Now we can select rules by clicking the select rule button. When selecting rules, first we need to select a default rule and then additional ILM rules to include. In this case, we will select the keep fabric pool objects at DC1 EC2 plus1 rule and then additionally our geodistributed eraser coding rule. Here we can see the filters that apply to the rule and if this rule only applies to older versions if you have S3 versioning enabled on the grid.The next step is to order our rules according to priority. The default rule and any non-compliant rule without a filter will be automatically placed at the bottom of the policy and cannot be moved. We want fabric pool at the top and then geodistribute EC underneath. We can order them by clicking and dragging the rules. Now we can click save and move on. The next step is to simulate the ILM policy. To do this, we click simulate and then we put in the address of the object we want to simulate. Remember that we can only simulate objects that are already on the grid. Here we can see that our object bucket one/demo.ext matches the geodistributed eraser coding rule because it is not on the fabric pool bucket and is greater than 1 megabyte. Now click finish. The final step is activating the policy. Before doing this, thoroughly review the ILM policy. Ensure that the rules are what you want to implement and that they are in the correct order. Finally, click activate. A final warning will pop up. Please be sure to read this alert and when you're absolutely sure, click okay. After clicking okay, there is no turning back. The new ILM policy is now activated. Thank you for watching.