Proactive Data Growth Management for High-Performance Applications and High Application Availability

With annual data growth of up to 125 percent, and inactive data reaching 80 percent, application data has become a significant IT cost center. This trend shows no signs of slowing. Application upgrades can quadruple the size of the production database. Security concerns mandate data redundancy, often by as much as a factor of 10. Consolidations of merged companies and rollouts to new users further contribute to the data explosion. As application data grows out of control, the cost of IT infrastructure soars, while system performance slows to a crawl.

The conventional response has been to repeatedly increase server and storage capacity. But this approach is only a temporary fix, and its ripple effects can be extremely costly. The "hardware treadmill" only defers what's really needed: a permanent solution that addresses the root cause - unmanaged data growth.

Live Archiving Helps Improve System Performance, Cut IT Costs, Meet 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 relocating historical transactions to online archives stored on more cost-effective servers and storage classes. Online archiving is an indispensable key to managing the application data lifecycle while ensuring regulatory compliance.

OuterBay LiveArchive manages accelerating data growth by relocating closed transactions and other infrequently-accessed data to an online, easily accessed archive database, significantly reducing the size of the production system and improving application performance. With OuterBay LiveArchive, you can:

• Identify inactive data based on activity history and
  retention policies
• Relocate inactive business transactions to less
  expensive storage
• Retain application transparency providing online, real-time user access to a combined view of production and archived data through native application and reporting interface.

By reducing the size of the production database, LiveArchive can boost application performance by as much as 70 percent, improve application availability and stability, and cut application environment costs by millions of dollars per year. And LiveArchive retains transparent, online, real-time access to both the production and archive data, using the source application's interfaces, forms, and reports.

Unlike traditional data management and storage solutions, Application Data Management (ADM) software is built from the ground up to be “application aware,” with data stored as complete business transactions. To help reduce production database size, improve system performance and lower IT infrastructure costs, only OuterBay LiveArchive offers a complete set of application-aware archiving features:

• Combined View of Data: Provides real-time, transparent visibility into a combined view of production and archive data.
• No User Training: Uses existing application interfaces, forms, and reports to access production and archive data through one point of entry.
• Zero Impact on Production System: Executes archive operations without shutting down the application.
• Restores High Performance: Improves application performance by reducing the size of production database including database reorganization and space reclamation.
• Policy-Based: Uses policy- and constraint-based definitions to create and enforce data retention and archiving policies.
• Data Parity: Maintains data parity so archive data has same structure as production data.
• Automatic Patch Detection: Monitors third-party patches and ensures patch synchronization of production and archive databases.
• Database Reorganization: Supports database table reorganization to reclaim allocated space.
• Restatement: Supports General Ledger restatement entries as required by regulations such as GAAP.
• Configuration Options: Flexible configuration for transparent data access and archive data storage: Single Instance, Single Instance History Only, Distributed, Physical, History Only.
• Archive Access Layer: Provides transparent data access allowing reporting of historical archive data in combination with active production transaction data.
• Oracle Support: Archiving Software Supports Oracle 10.7, 11, and 11i (Financials, Human Resources, Manufacturing, and Customer Relationship Management).
• PeopleSoft Support: PeopleSoft 7.5, 8.1, and 8.8 (Financials, Human Resources, Manufacturing, and Customer Relationship Management).
• Sybase Support: Through close partnership with Sybase, the database archiving solution supports Adaptive Server® Enterprise (ASE) 12.x.
• Oracle Attachments on Centera Support: Allows the relocation of the objects stored in Oracle Application attachments from the OLTP database to an EMC Centera device. This relocation facilitates the storage of large objects on a more cost effective device, without impairing access from the OLTP database.
• Additional Support: custom applications; databases; and operating systems, including Linux.
• Application Aware: Supports latest vendor patches and vendor upgrades to ensure compatibility between production and archive data.