The main goals of any Application ILM project are to reduce cost, improve application performance while maintaining compliance. To meet these goals, data has to be moved from a production database to either an online, accessible archive or purged completely from the system. In either case, data is deleted from production. Deleting data can have a significant impact on the production system’s performance if not executed carefully. However, once the data is gone – the benefits have a ripple effect. Production tables are smaller and more manageable. Recovery times and maintenance windows can be reduced. The cost of managing a smaller production database is reduced proportionally with the amount of data removed.
In order to realize the true benefits of a reduced database, the DBA’s will need to participate in a few cleanup activities – possibly reorganizing the database to reclaim the space. When data is selectively removed from a database, the storage of the remaining information resembles Swiss cheese. Reorganizing the database may or may not be a significant effort – regardless, the storage benefit will not be realized unless the space can be released at the file system. Once the DBA’s clean up the database, the storage team may also need to participate in a series of reorganization tasks within the storage array. These last two steps cannot be overlooked. There will be no benefit to an ILM project if the storage cannot be freed and reused for another application or released and credited in a charge-back model. The initial measured benefit of the project will be the amount of consumed resources before the ILM project minus the amount of consumed resources after the cleanup activities.
An Application ILM project can provide immediate relief when the storage has been released. However, a more important aspect of an ILM project is to evaluate the behaviors that got you here to begin with. ILM is not a technology problem, but rather a behavior problem. Once you can identify the broken processes or find the missing checks and balances in the consumption of IT resources, make the corrections, start rewarding responsible behaviors and integrate ILM activities into your day to day operations.
Julie Lockner President & Founder www.CentricInfo.com
