Informatica Perspectives

Over the last few blogs, we have stepped through a project to implement Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) on corporate databases.  First, we evaluated the target databases, then we determined the Business Objects and assigned retention periods to the data – including both Legal and Operational requirements.  Now that we are ready to start applying the retention policies and deleting data, it is a good idea to set up an archive database as an intermediate repository for business objects classified as legal records.
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A key benefit of implementing an Application Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) project is to reduce the amount of structured data in the data center.  Application ILM is a combination of a strategy and process that assesses information based on its business value and aligns the technology it resides on.  This process assures that the data center does not over allocate IT resources if the business doesn’t need it.  And likewise, if the business can provide detailed requirements for what it needs for its data, the IT department has a better idea of its technology forecasting needs.  Application ILM is a capacity planner’s friend.

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One aspect of an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) project that often gets overlooked is deleting data. Once information has reached the end of its usefulness, delete it. It is the single-most cost effective task you can execute on an ILM project. If you don’t have the data, you don’t have to store it, manage it, or worry about it getting into the wrong hands. Delete it.

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It is that time of year for some to reflect on the past or ponder the future.  If part of your end of year ritual includes cleaning out a cluttered closet or room in the house, consider the same ritual for the data in your databases.

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In December, 2005 Sun Microsystems conducted an interview with Bill Inmon, the father of the data warehouse concept.  He said, “ILM keeps a data warehouse from costing huge amounts of money and maintains good performance consistently throughout the data warehouse environment.”  Four years later, the average size of a data warehouse has increased by 200%, surpassing the multi-terabyte size benchmark. 

With these mammoth databases comes an increase in cost to manage them and a potential deterioration in performance.   It is common practice to leverage techniques like indexing and database partitioning to address query performance issues with very large databases but those techniques do not address challenges associated with the raw volumes of data.
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One of the challenges I face as a database archiving implementer and practitioner is where to store legacy database data after an application is retired.  Typical requirements include:

• Business wants to be able to access data should they need it to support ad hoc operational needs.
• Legal wants to be able to access data should they need it for litigation.
• IT wants to get rid of the data because it is costly to maintain the old application and technology it resides on.
• Executives want a solution that doesn’t create another silo of technology.
• Records Managers want to make sure data is purged when the retention period matures to maintain compliance.

The announcement of the CommVault and Informatica partnership addresses many of these requirements in one swoop.

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At the beginning of an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) project for my client’s Application and Data warehouse databases, my dialog begins with Records Management and the executive team to assess their ILM and Data Governance maturity.  These questions were briefly mentioned in my previous blog.  Here is some background on why the answers can dictate an ILM project’s success.

Are data retention schedules defined and are they assigned to a business owner?

Data targeted for ILM needs a business owner who is accountable and responsible for the data lifecycle – including defining when the data can be archived or deleted.  If data retention schedules do not exist or aren’t enforced, data volumes grow uncontrollably causing problems in the data center.  IT then owns the problem but isn’t able to address the solution unless business tells them what data can go where.  If data needs to be retained for longer periods of time, the business needs to provide IT with access requirements so they can properly design a database archive.

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Information LifeCycle Management (ILM) involves classifying data to map its business value to the corresponding features of the infrastructure it resides on.  This classification enables IT to appropriately build tiered infrastructure based on what the business needs, not based on the latest technology trends.  Benefits of an ILM solution include lower cost of storage, better use of existing IT resources and application performance by moving aged data off high end systems. Additionally, improvements to operational efficiencies due to shorter backup, restore and maintenance windows, while reducing risk of falling out of compliance are other benefits. [Read more]

I recently attended HP’s Software Universe and a big theme of the conference was ‘winning the war of managing application performance’. Having spent time walking the solutions showcase floor, speaking to attendees and SI partners, I can say this is still a really big deal. As the growth and size of production applications at the core of business continues, organizations are faced with a significant and costly challenge that will only continue to get worse.

Another audience in attendance, namely members of the QA and testing teams responsible for ensuring the quality of production applications, building and protecting realistic testing environments for their internal applications is another huge challenge. These team members need to sub-set and create test environments without impacting production systems performance or requiring a duplicate hardware footprint. Masking and protecting the data once it’s pulled from production is also a necessary step of ensuring control of the information housed within these critical systems.

It was refreshing to hear these challenges from real practitioners trying to solve problems for some of the largest organization in the world. Their pain validated the need for Application ILM solutions. These are real production-impacting issues that if not addressed will have huge cost and productivity impacts. If you’re an Informatica partner or practitioner, expanding your knowledge of these new offerings might make you a hero! I urge you to take a look.

John Schmidt recently wrapped up an insightful two-part series on the next "big thing" that will help bring data integration along. He notes that service-oriented architecture, which held a lot of promise, has certainly not turned out to be the silver bullet of integration that people had been hoping for. SOA may have disappointed to some extent on the integration front, and now, within the SOA community itself, there has been a raging debate as to whether the ultimate purpose of SOA even is integration. [Read more]