On the EMC thread again, Gus put together a piece on EMC and database archiving. This is the kind of software that DSS ought to be putting together, IMHO, it is a natural fit with their tape business. That they haven't is a reflection of their lack of imagination and energy.
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Now EMC fits another piece of the puzzle....this time in the area of structured data, specifically DATABASE ARCHIVING.
Again, with at least 20% market share of the SAN, NAS, CAS and Storage Management markets, EMC is, arguably, the only storage systems vendor that can now span the worlds of STRUCTURED and UNSTRUCTURED data like this especially with the acquisition of Documentum, which was increasingly referred to in some quarters as the Oracle of the unstructured data market.
Just like the object-based storage market, database archiving market appears to be an early stage market that can only grow faster with the entry of a vendor like EMC. Note for example, how Avamar, Permabit and other vendors have taken great care not to muck up and confuse the early stage market by fighting unnecessarily over the general outlines of the content-addressed market as shaped by EMC.
EMC to enter database archiving market
Deni Connor, Network World
11/03/2003 14:42:47
EMC is expected to introduce database archiving software in the first quarter of next year that will let customers improve the performance of their databases by migrating old data to less-expensive storage resources.
The company is set to introduce database archiving software it obtained through a partnership with start-up Outerbay Technologies. EMC says it will integrate Outerbay's Application Data Management (ADM) software into its own information management software. ADM is a suite of software that relocates dormant structured database transactions to online archives stored on more cost-effective servers and storage devices.
EMC already has software for archiving data. Earlier this year it acquired Legato Systems and with it the company's EmailXtender software, which archives semi-structured email messages as they age and need to be retained for regulatory reasons. EMC also recently acquired Documentum, a company that makes a variety of content management software, including archiving tools for unstructured content such as spreadsheets and video.
The market for archiving structured database information is growing as companies realise the necessity of not only protecting and retaining dormant data but also migrating it to other storage resources to increase the performance and efficiency of production databases.
"By law, companies have to keep information around," says Charlie Garry, an analyst with Meta Group. "But there's also a practical limit as to how large a database can be before you can no longer meet your service-level agreements for performance, recovery and backup. Initially customers want to get the data out of the production database, so the database doesn't have to slog through a whole bunch of data that no one cares about but can't get rid of."
The market for database archiving is relatively small. Only four companies focus on archiving information from databases and database applications — Princeton-Softech has 56 % of the market, followed by Outerbay, Applimation and IXOS Software, Gartner says. Applimation's software only archives Oracle database information; IXOS focuses on SAP and Siebel Systems; and Outerbay and Princeton-Softech's software runs on databases from IBM, Informix, Microsoft, Oracle and Sybase.
Mark Deck, director of infrastructure technology for National Medical Healthcard, a pharmacy benefit manager in Port Washington, New York, is looking at database archiving.
"We may do selective pruning — we'll write our own extracts and then move the stuff to appropriate storage rather than archive out to tape," Deck says. "Certainly, we want to archive data so we can increase the performance of our Oracle databases. As your storage grows, you face more than one thing — you face performance problems, space and time it takes to back up and restore."
Organisations also need to create policies that specify how long data will be retained, when to migrate it from one storage resource to another and how to get data back in the event it is needed. In database archiving, the software needs to be able to find and migrate individual rows of data to another source rather than the file-level migrations most hierarchical storage management products use. Meta Group estimates the market for database archiving software will grow from less than $US1 billion today to $4 billion by the end of 2007.
EMC, which also markets its Centera system for storing content-addressable storage — data that does not change over time — sees database archiving software as an essential part of its portfolio. The company presently partners not only with OuterBay for archiving software, but with Princeton-Softech and IXOS.
computerworld.com.au
More on OuterBay:
.....So, what is application data management? And why is it important? To examine these questions we need to consider what is happening in the world of databases.
To put it simply, these are getting bigger and bigger. This has a number of consequences. The most obvious is that it means that you need more disk capacity. However, this has a number of knock-on effects. Because you have more data to store on more disks, the database requires extra management time, needs more tuning, requires extended periods for back-ups and so on and so forth. Also, because so much extra data is stored, this means that re-tuning the database will not be enough to guarantee good performance, so you have to add extra memory, more processing power and so on. The bottom line is that it becomes more and more expensive to continue to provide optimal performance
it-director.com
EMC and Outerbay
emc.com
More on Princeton Technology:
.......What Princeton Softech decided to focus on was database archiving and its product set is called Active Archive. The name is important. Traditionally, archiving has been thought of as writing data to tape and putting it in a cupboard somewhere and forgetting about it. Archiving today isn't like that. You need to store more data for longer (often for corporate governance reasons but also for other purposes). Moreover, you are far more likely to need to be able to access that data easily.
There is a third distinction: you need different levels of archive. There are some sorts of data that may only need to be retrieved occasionally, but regularly enough to warrant the retention on disk, even if that is outside the main database.
In other words you need a hierarchy of archival options from occasionally used data, through very seldom used data, to data that you have to keep for legislative reasons but that you otherwise probably wouldn't have to both with. Princeton Softech provides facilities to allow you to identify which category particular data belongs to, define rules (either business rules, time-based rules or whatever) that determine how and when to archive, and the use of different archival strategies such as on-line in a database, on-line in a compressed flat file, on tape, or whatever is appropriate.
Of course the reason why archival of active data is important now is because of the explosion of data volumes. This places an expensive strain on the database. As the database gets bigger, so do the indexes built against it and you require more and more (expensive) disk capacity. Worse, performance goes down so you need more tin just to keep up.
it-director.com
EMC and Princeton Technology:
emc.com.
More on IXOS, which is being acquired by Open Text and which also recently partnered with Hitachi/HDS:
.....Ixos Software announced on Friday (January 24th) that it was acquiring both Obtree Technologies and the operating business of PowerWork AG. Unless you happen to be German (or Swiss in the case of Obtree) this is unlikely to mean a lot to you, unless you happen to be one of the minority of companies (at least in the UK) that are users of one of these companies' products.
In fact, Ixos is a major international player in the e-Business document management space, Obtree is (or was) a provider of real-time content management solutions (with a number of UK installations in local government) and PowerWork (which has never had a UK or US presence) has specialised in process management and workflow. The three technologies make an obvious fit and it is therefore easy to see why Ixos should want to acquire the other two companies.
it-director.com
EMC and IXOS:
emc.com |
