Six Easy Steps to Slashing Database Costs

by Brian Prince

Between upgrades, migrations and patches, managing a multiterabyte database is costly and effort-intensive. Database archiving, however, moves unused or inactive data from production databases to an archival repository for long-term retention, thereby deferring hardware upgrades by freeing up system resources. According to Forrester, enterprises can realize millions in savings through the results of archiving—deferring hardware upgrades, reducing downtime for upgrades, and gaining faster access to data and reduced storage cost.

While IT organizations often take a copy of production data to test their applications, this can become costly when production databases grow large. Through database subsetting, enterprises can create a smaller subset copy of production data while ensuring data and referential integrity. Typically, a subset copy can reduce database size by 40 percent or more, bringing significant savings by reducing storage and CPU requirements, according to Forrester. Among the vendors offering subsetting are Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Informatica.

Today, virtualized environments can provide new ways to cut costs by, for example, offering dynamic provisioning and sharing of system resources, thereby driving up server and storage utilization and lowering costs. Microsoft and VMware offer virtual machines that enable multiple databases to exploit common shared infrastructure. Additionally, the clustering of blade servers offers another model for sharing resources that delivers a scale-out architecture. Enterprises typically saved 20 percent or more on overall database costs using virtualization, according to Forrester.

Database-as-a-service technologies have gained ground in the past two years, and use cases have evolved for smaller critical database applications such as customer relationship management apps in the cloud.

Database outsourcing is a close cousin of database-as-a-service, but a much more tried and true option. Vendors such as The Pythian Group, Ntirety and others offer remote database administration services. However, before going with an outsourcing option, Forrester recommends reviewing the service-level agreement very careful to evaluate the vendors security framework and skills.

Through database consolidation, enterprises can reduce the number of physical database servers, thereby streamlining database administration and reducing demand for servers and storage. Consolidation also offers indirect cost benefits, including improved SLAs, increased operational efficiency and optimized infrastructure utilization, Forrester noted in the report.