With much of the world focused on high performance analytics and data warehousing enabled by columnar databases such as Sybase IQ, Vertica, and Paraccel, as well as companies like Greenplum and Netezza. A small company in the UK called Clearpace has quietly emerged on the scene with similar capabilities; but with compelling technology optimized for a completely overlooked problem domain, database archiving.
Curt Monash has done an excellent job summarizing Clearpace’s NPArchive product in this article so rather than reiterate his points, I’ll focus on the problem domain of database archiving and also discuss the new cloud-archiving service that Clearpace just launched yesterday called RainStor.
While every dog and their database is focused on the highly lucrative high performance analytics and data warehousing segment, database archiving or as Curt Monash calls it “information preservation” has gotten relatively little love in comparison. What problem does this solve? Think of the thousands of legacy apps out there who are running on “life support” with IT continuing to keep them running for occasional queries or access. These applications might well be be queued up for “retirement”,”decommissioning” or “sunsetting”, whatever word you want to use to describe the process, however, there is one simple problem, the end users of these systems may not be ready to completely turn them off. Rather, either for business or regulatory reasons, they require the data within the systems to still be accessible. So, what to do? You could turn off the apps and keep the data stored in the databases and continue to pay the licenses fees for a full blown RDBMS. Alternatively, you could back the data off to a compressed archive that isn’t queriable without re-inflating the data (which itself could take a significant amount of time, depending on the size of the data set). If you could actually retire these apps, you could free up the hardware, software licenses and even resources to focus on other more business critical IT initiatives. And in this recession, who wouldn’t want the opportunity to do more with less?
Wouldn’t it be great if you could instantly retire these applications, because your data could be archived and preserved into a significantly compressed footprint (say 40 to 1 ratio) and the data would still be accessable via on demand query using standard SQL92 or BI tools such as Microstrategy, Business Objects and others. There would then be no excuses … except the cost of the software licenses for the new technology. Oh but wait, what if all you had to pay was $1 per GB of data stored per month, and you could use as much or as little as you needed, because voila, it’s stored in the Cloud! Enter the RainStor Software as a Service (SaaS).
Apart from being a catchy name, RainStor uniquely allows you to “get your feet wet” with a Cloud based service while solving a hard problem of retiring your legacy apps with absolutely no risk. There’s no doubt that it is a crowded marketplace out there for highly compressed, high performance databases, but Clearpace with RainStor has a unique value proposition optimized for a common, albeit non-sexy, problem that every large company faces. If you have old applications hanging on for dear life, now would be a good time to “send them to data heaven” and free up those resources for more pressing business needs. Take a look at RainStor and Clearpace at www.rainstor.com and www.clearpace.com
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