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http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/07-nov/o67field.html
COMMENT: In The Field
By Ari Kaplan
Oracle's free ILM Assistant helps enterprises
implement cost savings.
Finding the storage necessary for corporate data is a
continuous problem. An Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) survey indicates that
92 percent of respondents anticipate that their database storage needs will
increase in 2007, and 64 percent say they'll increase spending on storage to
meet those needs.
In part, storage needs have increased because companies
need to retain data for long periods to satisfy compliance requirements such as
Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA. In addition, many companies routinely preserve e-mail
and other data as a defense against possible lawsuits. While hanging on to all
that data could save the day in such a situation, storing it in the meantime is
problematic and expensive.
Enter a Solution
Many companies are finding the solution to this dilemma
in the practice of information lifecycle management (ILM). I applied ILM
principles to a large insurance company client, which had more than 300
applications, about 200 Oracle databases, and nearly 100 data centers—and
major compliance issues, as you might guess. Using ILM approaches, the
insurance company retained the data it needed to satisfy legal requirements,
while significantly reducing the overall cost of storage.
The basic idea of ILM is to manage data actively
throughout its lifecycle. In particular, you want to choose the most
appropriate storage solution for your data at each point in its lifecycle. For
example, you might want to keep a recent e-mail (or transaction) readily
accessible for, say, 30 days so that you can use it. After that, you might want
it somewhat accessible for another 60 days, just in case. Beyond that, you
probably don't want it clogging up your system, although you might be unwilling
to throw it away.
The solution to this situation is to design several
tiers of storage. Tier A might consist of fast and roomy hard drives, which are
expensive. Tier B might be hard drives that are slower and smaller but
inexpensive. Tier C might be bulk storage, such as a tape drive library or,
increasingly, low-cost Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) disks.
Once you establish these tiers of storage options, you
assign data to each one. Must-have data goes on tier A,
nice-to-have data moves to tier B, and don't-care data gets dumped onto tier C.
You set up a mechanism—automatic is the goal, but possibly
manual—to maintain this arrangement, moving aging data from one tier to
another and defining and enforcing compliance policies. For its lifetime, then,
the data will migrate between the data tiers, and access to it will be
controlled. Eventually the data may be archived, or it can remain inside the
database forever.
The potential cost savings of this strategy is amazing.
Typically, tier A hard drives cost 5 to 10 times more
(per GB) than tier B hard drives and up to 50 to 100 times more than bulk tier
C storage. In one study, a company moved nearly all of its data from US$72/GB
hard drives to a US$4/GB online archive, reducing its storage costs by 94
percent.
This practice does not discard necessary data. If a
file is needed to meet compliance requirements or to satisfy discovery in a
lawsuit, you can still access it. So ILM saves money while also supporting your
company's compliance strategies.
ILM becomes more complicated with databases. You must
ensure that applications can find data, no matter where it is physically
located. In addition, you don't want to degrade database performance. Several
Oracle Database characteristics facilitate an ILM solution: it's fine-grained,
has enforceable compliance policies, has application transparency, and is
low-cost.
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Steps READ more about ILM DOWNLOAD ILM JOIN the ILM Assistant forum |
Oracle offers a tool to help with the complexity.
Oracle ILM Assistant is GUI-based software that can create lifecycle
definitions; advise you on when to move or delete data, based on those
definitions; display the storage requirements—and cost savings—for
a given ILM plan; suggest how to partition a table based on your lifecycle
definitions; provide underlying technology such as triggers; and simulate
events on a table as if it were partitioned. Oracle ILM Assistant itself does
not make any physical changes to your database. But it does generate scripts so
that you can perform the necessary tasks when you're ready. And it's free.
ILM is a practice that's gaining acceptance in the
marketplace because of its proven cost savings. Using Oracle ILM Assistant can
make it easier to finally have the right place for everything.
