smartARCHIVE is the smart solution for SAP BW Data Archiving. smartARCHIVE provides the methodology and software tools for providing fast and efficient transparent access to virtually infinite storage.
Storage Problem
With the explosion of data growth in today’s database and data warehouse environments, there now exist significant challenges. Effective data warehousing can provide a unified, consistent view of the business, but the key to getting that view is the ability to access data from as many relevant and diverse sources of data as possible.
As a result, companies are increasingly amassing large amounts of data. According to analysts, data volumes for typical data warehouses are growing by 125% a year. As the growth in data volume continues, companies find themselves with more and more historical data that is accessed less and less frequently, becoming inactive.
Informed business decisions require immediate access to all data, yet 80-90% of data warehouse data is typically inactive on the system. Yet, this data must be actively maintained within the data warehousing environment to access when required. Here lies the problem, which can lead to a number of data management challenges.
Data warehouse end-user challenges:
- Making timely, informed business decisions
- Cannot wait for offline historical data to be restored - need access to data for regular reporting and ad-hoc analysis
Data warehouse IT management challenges:
- Making timely, informed business decisions
- High costs of adding/managing online disk storage
- High costs of data backup and recovery, especially when much of the data is infrequently accessed
- Reduce administrative burden
- Data protection and availability
smartARCHIVE Solution
smartARCHIVE is the total solution for efficiently and cost effectively archiving your SAP R/3 data. smartARCHIVE is a tool/methodology and extractor that facilitates the building of an archiving solution in R/3 and feeds it into BW. What gets archived in R/3 is what is captured in BW equating to synchronization. As well, smartARCHIVE incorporates tools utilized to determine the retention logic for data archival from BW.
R/3 captures the archived information in Info-structures as part of Archiving Information System. The Info-structure data is transferred to BW via Generic Data sources. Data is stored in ODS objects in BW. Data is archived from the ODS objects to storage on a periodic basis (monthly). smartARCHIVE does not create its own filesystem, but uses XDSM (DMAPI), a data storage management interface, to interact with the local filesystem. DMAPI provides the framework for moving datafiles and tablespaces around and keep track of their location. This allows for a uniform way to access the recent and near-on-line data.
smartARCHIVE addresses the challenges of the end-user:
- Provides transparent access with no changes required to front-end queries or applications
- Data can be changed or updated as needed
- Faster delivery of data (From a recovery operation--back-up and recovery)
- Improves Business Intelligence Application effectiveness
- Ability to bring more data into BI models and queries, which could impact effectiveness of predictive DSS models.
smartARCHIVE addresses the challenges of IT management:
- Provides cost-effective, virtual database storage
- Tape libraries, optical jukeboxes or lower-cost disk
- Automated data management
- Virtualizes storage into single logical view
- Delivers dramatic improvements in backup and recovery
- Managed datafiles are automatically backed-up
- Decreases backup time by not having to ‘back-up’ nearly 90% of the data in an RDBMS
- More than doubles an order-of magnitude decrease in database recovery times (using archive redo logs).
- Ensures data protection and availability
- Ability to write additional copies of data to storage in remote data centers
smartARCHIVE Benefits
The major benefits of utilizing the smartARCHIVE Solution for BW Data Archiving are:
- Return on Investment (ROI)
- ROI on overall Software/Hardware/Deployment costs
- Value of immediate access to all data and improved accuracy of BI
- Dramatic Decrease in Backup and Recovery Times
- Using Oracle RMAN, DXDB can backup at disk speeds and significantly reduce database recovery times
- A powerful, yet easy-to-deploy storage solution
- Transparent Access to Data
- Runs existing queries without modification
- No changes required to front end applications or user interface
- High-Performance Scalability
- Scales in performance as well as capacity
- Minimal DBA time required to migrate data or bring other databases under management by the system
- Disaster Recovery
- Protects against media failure with automatic multiple copies of data
- Option to write copies to remote data centers for disaster recovery
The smartARCHIVE Solution was developed and is supported by ITSapiens and Legato. Legato is a global provider of enterprise-class solutions and services for Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) – helping organizations achieve business continuity, operational efficiency and regulatory compliance. |
