Analysts say the small database archiving market will see changes as
the demands of information-as-a-service vendors and the explosion of
corporate data come to a head.The database archiving market is set to change as the needs of users
usher in an era of partnerships and a new emphasis on the technology by
database vendors, industry watchers said.
Currently, the database archiving market remains relatively
tiny, with a small subset of players such as Solix, Neon and
Applimation. But as
HP's acquisition of OuterBay in 2006 and
IBM's acquisition of Princeton Softech
in September demonstrate, the market for database archiving tools is
growing. An IDC report estimated the sector grew 13.6 percent between
the third quarter of 2006 and the third quarter of 2007, driven by
e-discovery, regulatory compliance and overall storage optimization
needs.
Brian Babineau, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, sees
an opportunity for application, database and information service
vendors to partner with providers of archiving tools to deal with the
explosion of data organizations are facing.
"The privacy regulations are making subsetting more important
in test and development environments," Babineau said. "The approximate
average retention period for database records is roughly 6-10 years.
Over half of electronic discovery events involve database information.
With all these drivers, just over a third of the market is using
database archiving solutions. It is only a matter of time before
organizations realize the risks of creating too many copies of the
information and decide that archiving as well as subsetting is a much
better approach."
The number of primary databases is going up 25 percent
annually, Enterprise Strategy Group estimates, with the number of
secondary databases rising as well.
Large databases can drag application performance and it is here
that database archiving vendors make their pitch. When databases become
less manageable, customers look to archive, and while many
organizations develop custom archiving tools, integration with the
database, storage software and seamless integration with the
application tend to make things more complex.
Eventually, database vendors are going to step up their own archiving tools, predicted Carolyn DiCenzo, an analyst with Gartner.
"I think [the market] actually goes away; I think it becomes
part of the database infrastructure," she said. "It just becomes one of
the things that database vendors need to provide for their users in
order to meet this requirement. I really don't see any benefit for
having it heterogeneous and people would rather get this from the
database vendor than from a third party," she said.
"But where you'd see vendors get involved, it would be vendors
such as SAP, or the application side of Oracle…where it sees customers
hitting the wall, performance or recoverywise," she continued. "So they
would team with a database archiving solution to offer users a way to
segment and remove older data from the archive. The vendors wouldn't do
it themselves, they would just extend the eco-structure and either
certify or co-market with an archiving solution."
Officials at Neon and Princeton Softech agreed
that IAAS (information as a service) vendors will look to integrate
with archiving software providers to support the integration of
structured, unstructured and semi-structured data in both active and
inactive repositories.
"This move toward IAAS should also make it easier for
companies to include data archiving as part of the application and
information life cycle, making the practice of archiving even more
prevalent," said Robin Reddick, vice president of marketing and
communications at Neon. "As we have talked with customers about
archiving, several have recognized the opportunity to use an archive
data store to populate the databases used for business
intelligence/business analytics. By using an archive, they are able to
have a centralized data store from which to extract data."
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IBM's
Information On Demand strategy,
which included the acquisition of FileNet to handle unstructured data
management and Princeton Softech for structured data, has been built
partly with that idea in mind. Many of IBM's solutions address data in
both active and inactive repositories, noted Al Smith, executive vice
president of engineering for IBM Information Management. Optim, for
example, addresses data through its full life cycle—production, near
line, archived, offline tape, worm and ultimate disposal—and has the
ability to present data that has been moved to inactive stores back to
the application, he said.
"Also you will find part of the Cognos acquisition strategy is
addressing the unique needs of warehouse and BI use of data that is no
longer transactional," he said. "It is another step in the full
Enterprise Data Management structure."
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