Claudia Chandra, Product Manager of the Data Archive suite at Informatica wrote a nice piece today titled A Secure, Cost Effective Home for Your Retired Application Data. (Disclosure: Informatica is a major partner and investor in my current company RainStor)
Here are some exerpts of her post (in italics) and how the specialized repository that Informatica uses gives them a competitive advantage:
Informatica Data Archive is different from other archiving solutions because it provides you with exactly that option – archiving to a highly optimized, immutable, secure, and compressed file format. It also yields up to 98% compression, thereby reducing your storage capacity footprint dramatically. At the same time, you can still access and report against your archived data from any reporting or Business Intelligence tool, as though it is still stored in traditional relational databases. The optimized file-based archive format accomplishes all this without the burden of specialized administration or expensive high performance hardware.
3 fundamental tenants differentiate Informatica’s offering from traditional relational databases: Reduce. Retain. Retrieve.
Reduce – A unique combination of value, pattern and algorithmic software techniques examine each data value as it is loaded into the repository. Unlike a traditional RDBMS, the values of the records are stored as unique nodes in a tree structure. Duplicate values are not stored again thereby saving at both a value and pattern level. While the data de-duplication process significantly compresses the size of the data being stored, there is no loss in the integrity of the original form of the records as the repository retains the original structure through a system of pointers. When a query is executed, the information is returned in its original form, just like a traditional database.
Retain – Apart from being immutable, which means no updates are allowed, the repository also provides configurable retention rules and metadata annotation options not available in a typical database. With fine grained control down to the record level, the data can be secured, annotated, policies set for expiry, while ensuring secure access to only those individuals who are authorized.
Retrieve – Traditional techniques to reduce the size of data usually takes the form of brute force compression, e.g. WinRAR, ZLib, Gzip and so forth. As such, the data requires a re-inflation step prior to access which results in delay which means slower performance. the repository that Informatica uses has data reduction techniques which provides exceptional performance with no re-inflation needed. The data structures are stored and queried in exactly the same form as illustrated in the diagram. The intelligence of the optimizer allows any SQL dialect (Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server etc.) to deliver the results from with excellent response times. Furthermore, the repository is not disk-bound and very CPU-friendly. If you need your queries to run faster, adding CPUs or cores can proportionately speed up the return of results.
Finally once the data is safely loaded, the physical representation of the data is optimized for low-cost commodity or specialized disk and systems such as EMC Centera. A great option and very timely given Informatica’s newly announced partnership with EMC. The architecture also makes it ideal for cloud deployment as illustrated with Informatica Data Archive Cloud Store Option
All this yields great TCO as indicated by Informatica’s case study customer Adelphia:
Informatica customer, Adelphia was able to shut down their legacy financial, treasury, and franchise legal application by using Informatica Data Archive to retire the data. They then use standard ODBC/JDBC interfaces to query the Informatica file-based archive and deliver the necessary application data to their business users on demand. They were able to retain all of the data and maintain access through inexpensive server and storage infrastructure, with 5% of the original database size and 5% of the staff time required to maintain the original application. The resulting ROI of 211% speaks for itself.
Looks like Informatica has really cracked the code on retiring applications, while providing visitation opportunities. Certainly enough to satisfy business users and compliance requirements while saving their customers a bundle.