OuterBay Technologies on Monday will release an update to its Application Data Management suite that will feature cross-enterprise application data lifecycle management.
With ADM 3.0, the Campbell, Calif., company is promising a unified view of enterprise data from applications including those from Oracle Corp., PeopleSoft Inc. and other major enterprise application vendors.
ADM uses a policy-based approach to establish and enforce data retention that differentiates between active and inactive data—or, as the companys new tagline puts it, “the right data, at the right time, in the right place.”
According to OuterBay officials, this type of data lifecycle management can slash storage costs by millions of dollars, since inactive, nontransactional data can be stored on less expensive storage devices than those needed for active read operations.
The suite has four components: Application Resource Monitor, Instance Generator, LiveArchive and, new to this release, Developer Edition.
The new Developers Edition component enables support for custom or customized applications and databases.
The Application Resource Monitor monitors, forecasts and models data growth, which enables DBAs (database administrators) to groom their retention policies for optimal system performance and better storage resource use. The fact that DBAs can keep an eye on storage growth also enables them to keep a lid on storage costs, according to OuterBay officials.
Instance Generator allows enterprises to create smaller, relationally intact subsets of production databases. DBAs can use these database subsets for testing, development, staging and training.
LiveArchive identifies and relocates inactive data to an easily accessible database residing on low-cost storage. LiveArchive enables users to access such data transparently in real-time via forms and reports.
ADM 3.0 supports structured and nonstructured data from Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, Informix and Sybase Inc. databases. It runs on Unix, Windows NT, Solaris, AIX and Linux. The suite supports low-cost ATA drive options as well as leading storage and server classes and has an extensible storage adapter layer.
Lois Hughes, a senior business systems analyst for the Global Accounts Receivable department at Tektronix Inc.—a test, measurement and monitoring technology company in Portland, Ore.—said that OuterBays commitment to data lifecycle management mirrors her own companys concerns. “We take a very proactive approach to data management, to get the maximum out of our integrated solutions,” she said.
Hughes said that OuterBays LiveArchive tool is particularly effective at shaving IT costs. “With the LiveArchive tool, we can archive data from our production environment in such a way that the archive data looks exactly like our production data, so we have no additional costs for training users on how to access storage media,” she said.
Another thing Hughes likes about ADM 3.0 is faster table queries, amounting to between 70 percent and 60 percent faster, thanks to the fact that a bulk of the tables data can be archived and hence neednt be queried.
Finally, Hughes gave a thumbs-up to ADM 3.0s Instance Generator. Tektronix has a test and development environment that mirrors the companys production environment. Because of the smaller database subset generated by Instance Generator, management of the development and test environment is “much easier,” she said. “You save time, storage, database size, all those things. When youre working on development efforts and you can minimize the data youre working with, it helps a great deal,” she said.
ADM 3.0 is priced per gigabyte and depends on a given implementation.
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