Database Archiving Solutions, Trends, and Practices

According to a data storage survey conducted in 2007, the top drivers for database storage solutions was data security which was locked in by 56% of the respondents. Interoperability, data management, and cost were the other major pivots for buying data storage. The world’s yearly data would eventually need about 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage, with an average of 250 megabytes of information per person, so says Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian in their book How Much Information published in 2003. But, here one can ask the question, that when enterprise data is exploding at a frantic pace, can escalation of data storage purchasing solve the problem? Obviously not, say analysts.

For burgeoning enterprises with mission critical databases, database archiving is rapidly becoming a necessity, not an option. Database archiving is a solution to a number of seemingly unrelated issues. Those include improving the performance and availability of the live production databases, managing data retention policies - notably compliance - effectively, and preserving database data as long as required. Above all, database archiving keeps the business running.

Indusa Technical Corp., a SEI-CMM Level 4 company has launched its flagship product ArchivePlus, a database archiving solution, addresses multiple issues in an enterprise, improving the performance and availability of live production databases, managing compliance related to data retention policies and preservation of database data as required. ArchivePlus helps in migrating data from live production databases to database archives, while managing the integrity and accessibility of information in those archives.

ArchivePlus helps organizations effectively manage application databases while controlling costs and supporting compliance programs. Archiving is the foundation for managing the Lifecycle of database data, and an essential tool for Intelligent Information Management. The solution satisfies three objectives:
1. Resource Management
2. Storage & Data Protection
3. Compliance (with external regulations & internal policies).

It is a well-known fact that data is growing at the rate of 125% every year. The compliance requirements proposed by a host of standards of regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA make it mandatory to store data in their databases. According to a report by Meta Group, more than 80% of the data remains inactive. The effective solution to this list of problems is by archiving old or rarely accessed database records at regular intervals. This makes the systems give optimum performance and become slim and trim. Hence it is necessary to identify inactive business transactions and separate the data into different categories, so that one can define their own predefined database archiving constraints.