Intelligent Insight to Track, Forecast, and Manage Application Data Growth

With annual data growth of up to 125 percent, and inactive data reaching 80 percent, application data has become a significant IT cost center. Software upgrades, redundancy requirements, and company mergers only add to the problem. Yet most organizations today lack the ability to accurately track and analyze data growth, then set and enforce retention policies. The result: poor system performance, high IT infrastructure costs and difficulty achieving regulatory compliance.

To seize control of the situation, today's smart IT organizations take an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) approach, dedicating high-end resources to production data while assigning more cost-effective solutions to inactive data. But traditional data management and storage solutions simply cannot provide an enterprise view of application data. Only OuterBay delivers "application aware" software, with data stored as complete business transactions, for cradle-to-grave application data management.

Most organizations today lack the ability to accurately track and analyze data growth, then set and enforce data retention policy. The result: poor system performance, high storage costs and increasing compliance issues. The OuterBay Application Data Management (ADM) suite is designed to help you improve system performance, reduce the TCO of your IT infrastructure and achieve regulatory compliance by managing the entire application data lifecycle.

A key component of the OuterBay ADM suite, Application Resource Monitor (ARM) is an enterprise dashboard that intelligently monitors systems, forecasts and models data growth to provide real-time application performance monitoring and helps create and enforce effective data retention policies. OuterBay ARM lets you:

• Monitor current data allocation and growth activity
• Forecast data growth across applications, databases, business processes and storage classes
• Model and Preview the impact of data retention policy without affecting production data
• Diagnose and Resolve data management issues before they impact operations.

Improved retention policies enable the enterprise to maintain optimum system performance, better utilize storage resources, and proactively manage storage costs while fulfilling SLAs. Only OuterBay ARM delivers the ability to accurately analyze and police application data wherever it resides.

ARM lets you generate a wide variety of detailed reports that include the following:

• Enterprise Data Distribution Report: Shows how data is distributed by business applications, users, departments and storage devices, across an organization or its departments.
• Application Data Growth Report: Drills down into a business application on a specific instance to show data growth over time. The report also shows the growth of active and inactive data over time.
• Storage Utilization By Module Report: Shows the distribution of storage/server space by application module. This report helps to identify which modules are consuming the most space.
• Data Growth Forecast: Support forecasting with full modeling capability for events like application upgrades, data imports, archiving etc.
• Top 100 Tables Report: Shows the top 100 largest tables in the business application.

For applications IT management, ARM provides total visibility and control of application data growth across the enterprise:

• Enterprise Dashboard: Provides a view of all database instances in your enterprise environment. Monitors and analyzes application performance in both graphical and tabular form. Supports aggregation, drill-downs and alerts.
• Time-based Policy Preview: Provides ability to preview the impact of retention policies. Allows "what if" analysis by graphically displaying projected data volumes for any given time-based archiving policy.
• Retention Policy Control: Sets and enforces data retention policies for more cost-effective management of application data.
• Packaged Application Mapping: Provides out-of-the-box support for Oracle and PeopleSoft application modules.
• Custom Application Mapping: Provides an open interface to allow mapping of packaged application customizations as well as custom applications.
• Advanced Modeling Capability: Allows modeling of a business applications data growth life cycle and then measuring its impact across the enterprise.
• Customizable Alert Thresholds: Set alert thresholds to flag applications that are growing rapidly. There are also alerts for applications that have a large amount of inactive data.
• Support for OuterBay Suite: Integrated with OuterBay Live Archive, Encapsulated Archive, Instance Generator, and Developers Edition to manage application growth throughout the enterprise.