Storage Technology Research Library

This presentation covers the applications that create structured data, the business reasons for archiving that data, and the important issues that executives must consider when planning, selecting and implementing a structured-data archiving solution. This presentation reflects lessons learned from numerous successful structured-data archiving projects.

Attend this session to answer these questions:

• What is structured data? -Many key business processes and applications store business records in database structures. For example, enterprise applications such as Oracle Financials, Peoplesoft and SAP may store their records in databases from Oracle, Sybase, IBM or Microsoft. Special-purpose and custom applications in areas such as research and development are also generating large amounts of structured data.
• How do today's record-retention requirements, and the resulting data growth, impact application performance and storage costs? -Typically these records must be stored for several years to meet regulatory, legal and operational requirements for record retention and access. The resulting data growth strains the infrastructure, requiring acquisition of more servers and storage while also reducing performance and increasing recovery times. One solution is to purge all data that is more than a few months old -- but that is no longer a viable option for key business data that is required by Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulations, or needed for litigation readiness or operational data mining.
• How does structured-data archiving help, and how is it done? -Successful solutions involve relocation of historical data from the active database to a historical data set that may be stored on a less-expensive tier of storage, or placed on tamper-proof storage for compliance and data protection. By reducing the size of the active data set, these archiving solutions reduce the amount of server and storage resources needed to index and query the active data set --and they also speed application performance and recovery time. There are several products that can accomplish the record selection and relocation task, such as OuterBay LiveArchive, EMC DatabaseXtender, and products from Applimation and Princeton Softech.
• What are the lessons learned that can help ensure successful selection and deployment of an archiving solution? -Successful implementation requires a careful review of related business practices, to ensure that the data from historical periods can be selected and relocated without causing problems at the application level. (For example, open orders must be closed at the end of each accounting period, if they are to be successfully archived as part of a specific historical period.) Executives also need to consider the appropriate storage formats for medium-term and long-term archiving, and plan for future application changes and format conversions. Finally, executives should consider whether the available solutions for structured-data archiving can be combined with solutions for archiving semi-structured and unstructured data.

This session assumes general familiarity with structured data archiving technologies and applicable regulations.