Archivers Prepare for Upgrades

Exploding data, compliance, and privacy concerns with databases are making for a lengthy laundry list as users prepare for database upgrades and the associated archiving tools.

Database archiving products let users archive and purge inactive data, reducing the size of the production database to improve performance, while making backups and restores more efficient. Ideally, they also help users retrieve data quickly for compliance purposes.

Hewlett-Packard led the charge of major storage vendors into database archiving when it acquired OuterBay in February, but startups Applimation, Solix Technologies, and Princeton Softech are looking to hang in the game as the market picks up. (See HP Hops on OuterBay, Wipro Resells Solix, and Users Pick Princeton Softech.) Scentric recently came out of stealth with software that classifies and archives databases as well as unstructured data and email, a capability also claimed by Solix. (See Scentric Gets Classified.)

Bala Nachimuthu, applications database administrator of Cranberry, Pa.-based windows manufacturer Traco, says in the two years since his shop installed Oracle E-Business Suite's Manufacturing family of applications, rapid data growth has slowed performance. Traco turned to Solix's ArchiveJinni to archive data to disk and purge unneeded files.

"The size of our database grew too quickly, and was negatively affecting performance," Nachimuthu says. "Now we take all our current data and move it to an online hard disk. If that becomes, say, five or seven years old, we move it to tape or another medium. And we not only archive, but we also purge data."By having more data archived on disk, Traco can retrieve it quicker when necessary.

"For instance, our financial people want to move data from the source to an archive," Nachimuthu says. "Then they may want it back, so we need to bring it back to the source. And we want to be able to look at the data before we bring it back to the source."

For similar reasons, TD Bank Financial Group IT manager Robert Skaljin uses Princeton Softech's Optim with his company's PeopleSoft Enterprise human resources application.

"Our goal is to improve our online performance. If we archive data and keep it to a known size, performance can be more predictable," he says. "We can also access data when it's archived. Optim product has a viewing tool, so once business users need information they can pull it up through their viewing tool. We would have had to build that viewing capability ourselves if we didn't buy an archiving tool."

Apart from performance and compliance, there are other reasons to explore database archiving. The Oracle Fusion project is another driver. (See Oracle Details Blueprint .) Fusion will integrate pieces of the PeopleSoft, Siebel, and JD Edwards products Oracle acquired along with its legacy databases. Oracle's Fusion applications aren't due until 2008, but anticipation could prompt companies to clean up their data stores in preparation."The number one reason people buy database archiving is because they have to upgrade or migrate their application," says Charlie Garry, an independent analyst who follows the database market. "With Oracle's Fusion application coming out, this is a key time for a database administrator to be thinking about, 'Maybe I should be getting organized from a data perspective, and clean up what shouldn't be there so I won't have to do all that when I upgrade.' "

As with practically all storage vendors these days, the database archiving firms are bumping up security to keep sensitive customer data safe from unauthorized eyes. They use features such as data masking, data substitution, data shuffling, or null values to replace characters in the database with alternate characters, delete certain columns of information, and replace data with random substitute data. They also support third-party encryption tools.

"Security is big for the whole storage market, with information privacy and security hanging over us. It's going to be an especially big deal with database archives, because the biggest threats come from the inside. These documents are where you store information like customers' credit card numbers," Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Brian Babineau says.

While it's important for the archiving tools to integrate with Oracle and other enterprise databases, Traco's Nachimuthu says he wants to use it with home-grown applications, too. He says he chose Solix because its Web-based tool lets him archive data in custom apps without writing code.

"Business users can use this tool," he says. "You can choose tables and it generates the code in the background. If I want to change my archiving and purging rules a year from now, I can change them myself. It gives us a way to go and write a custom rule."Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and Switch