Tag Archives: ILM
Are You Ready To Implement Information Lifecycle Management For Your Databases?
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.
Application ILM And Data Governance Go Hand In Hand – Part 2
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. (more…)
A Wave Of New Mergers And Acquisitions – Are You Prepared to succeed?
I was driving to work this week when I heard about Walt Disney Company’s announcement to buy comic book giant Marvel Entertainment (MVL) for US$4 billion. I started thinking about what it would be like to see the X-MEN hanging out with Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs the next time I take my kids to Disneyland. At the same time, I was wondering if an increase mergers and acquisitions were a sign of an economic recovery? (more…)
Application Data Growth – Start Planning Now!
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.
How Green is Your Data Integration Strategy?
Going green in IT can help the corporate bottom line and the environment. An organization can increase operational efficiency and minimize environmental damage through the following activities.
• Conserve electricity through better power management
• Virtualize IT including information access and delivery
• Recycle hardware for other use and minimize space requirements
• Establish development reuse frameworks to reduce resource consumption
• Improve collaboration to minimize people-related carbon footprints
Philip Howard wrote an intriguing piece entitled Real-time Goes Green and asserted that “Real-time data integration requires less in the way of computing power than using a traditional approach, either with real-time data movement combined with batch, or batch on its own. And that translates into less hardware, less space on the data centre floor, lower power requirements and less need for cooling.”
This got me to think about what other ways data integration can go green. So here is my initial list. (more…)