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Improve performance, reduce TCO with data archiving

By Christa Roets, customer services manager, Datacentrix

Johannesburg, 04 Jul 2008

The rapid accumulation of data worldwide continues at an unprecedented rate. In fact, according to the META Group, relational databases are growing at a rate of 125% annually.

Enterprise databases are doubling and even tripling in size and exceeding projected estimates, resulting in serious consequences.

The accumulation of data leads to degraded performance and slower response time. Availability is limited because routine database maintenance requires more processing time, often taking systems out of service. Managing larger databases also has an impact on critical disaster recovery time. If a business relies on data-intensive, mission-critical business applications, then unmanaged database growth directly affects its bottom line, as its risks losing customers, frustrating users and missing new revenue opportunities.

Managing and storing enterprise data are becoming top priorities for IT executives. CIOs face an increasing demand for 100% availability of mission-critical applications, 24/7 e-business support and scalable access to enterprise data on a variety of platforms. But corporate databases are growing so large that just maintaining traditional service levels has become a demanding challenge for many IT organisations. So, what happens when accelerating database growth is allowed to continue?

Consequences of Continued Database Growth For most companies, the solution to exponential database growth is to upgrade servers and acquire more storage capacity. Faster, more powerful processors can speed up access to information, while the underlying databases continue to grow. However, this approach is rapidly losing its viability for many reasons.

As database size increases, the performance of mission-critical applications deteriorates. The larger the database, the more time it takes to load, unload, search, reorganise, index and optimise. Not only do response times slow, but access to decision-making information becomes more difficult and service levels decline.

In the past, IT could count on a linear increase in capacity to keep the service levels within an acceptable tolerance. However, demand for high performance is more critical than ever, requiring more frequent and larger increases in capacity to satisfy the demand. Enter Database Archiving

Archiving becomes strategic as it grows in importance to organisations. In fact, it can help in speeding up business processes, supporting a company's compliance efforts, forming the basis for Records Management (automating the management of record archiving and retention policies) and preserving the organisation's knowledge.

Many IT executives are already convinced that an effective database archiving strategy makes sense, and they are actively searching for viable solutions. The alternatives include building and maintaining a custom database archiving solution in-house or purchasing "off-the-shelf" database archiving software. To properly archive data, the ideal database archiving solution must address the following minimum requirements:

* Preserve the business context of the archived data, even for the most complex relational data model.
*Include a "selective delete" feature to accurately remove precise sets of related data from a production database, leaving all other data intact.
* Offer a preview or "deferred delete" capability to prevent removing data accidentally.
* Manage archived data efficiently and effectively.
* Support intelligent indexing, providing a sure and fast way to identify archived data for easy retrieval.
* Provide a fast and easy way to locate specific data across all archives.
* Allow for browsing archived data directly.
* Support complete integration of the archiving strategy with any application, while meeting business requirements.
* Provide a "selective restore" capability that allows for accurately restoring only a few rows of data, as needed.
* Support for multiple databases and operating platforms, including federated access and cross-database interoperability.
* Deliver comprehensive and scalable capabilities that meet your company's needs across the enterprise, today and in the future.

Implementing off-the-shelf database archiving software is a cost-effective approach that directly addresses the problem of database growth without diverting internal resources from IT business initiatives. The ideal database archiving solution must have the flexibility and enterprise scalability to be implemented with any application across your enterprise, without writing and maintaining program code. Off-the-shelf database archiving technology delivers comprehensive archive, restore, and storage capabilities that can be implemented quickly and easily customised. The basic implementation strategy includes:

* Analysing your business rules and objectives, archive requirements and policies, access and storage requirements.
* Identifying the data that can be archived to meet your business objectives. This process includes analysing the effects of archiving application data and identifying customisations that may be necessary.
* Verifying the archive process, which includes selectively archiving and removing data from a production database, as well as accessing, researching and restoring archived data, as needed.

Most companies implement archiving solutions using a phased approach, with the overall corporate objective to employ a strategic database archiving solution across the enterprise. Once the archiving policies are established for a selected data-intensive application, much of the process is automated. As database archiving continues on a regular basis, archiving solutions provide tools that help determine the optimum amount of data to remove. This systematic approach can then be extended to other mission-critical applications.

As a practical example of using this type of technology to the best effect, a locally based Datacentrix customer recently implemented IBM's Optim solution for the delivery of archive-and-purge functionality for database applications. Customers around the globe use this solution to assist them in managing data volume growth, lowering their total cost of software ownership and to implement their data management strategy.

By implementing this archiving solution, the company in question is seeing benefits including the provision of one open archiving solution for current and future archiving needs using the current technology offered by IBM, a solution that can be integrated in the existing IT infrastructure and is scalable, secure archiving of data, access to archived data as and when needed and a robust and secure solution for highest data volumes.

It is becoming more and more apparent that archiving matters more than ever to every organisation, particularly in the face of today's climate of strict compliance and demands for maximising ROI. Database archiving is already assisting many businesses worldwide to better control costs, more efficiently use resources, increase system availability and meet compliance requirements and it is gratifying to see that local companies are swiftly moving in the same direction.

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Editorial contacts

Nicola Knight
PR Connections
(083) 269 2227
datacentrix@pr.co.za
Nteseng Maboe
Datacentrix Holdings
(012) 348 7555
nmaboe@datacentrix.co.za