Factors to Consider while Choosing Database Archiving Tools

By CIOReview | Thursday, May 25, 2017

According to Gartner, 47 percent of the companies find growing data as a biggest data center hardware infrastructure challenge. This immense rise in the data can drive infrastructure costs up while diminishing application performance and productivity. The rapid expansion in the volume of enterprise data will lead to higher quality analysis if the data are stored and managed with an eye on the inherent value. To overcome this daunting issue, database archiving has come into sight as an Information Life Cycle Management (ILM) best practice.

With the help of Database Archiving, enterprises can increase performance, reduce costs, and achieve compliance goals. Database Archiving moves less frequently accessed data from production databases into an archive in order to optimize application performance.

With various providers out there, how do you choose an apt database archiving platform?

There are various types of tools available to archive data. The first and the foremost tool that comes to mind is a big disk array. The limited capabilities to data verification and scalability have posed a great challenge. However, when it comes to price disk arrays are a steal. In addition to this they also have very mature power-saving capabilities such as spin-down drives.

Apart from these traditional archive storage systems—cloud storage services is another archiving system that has gained traction. With the unlimited space in the cloud, enterprises will never run out of capacity. There are some cloud providers through third-party archive solutions also can provide complete data integrity checking. Along with that, they also have the benefit of a pay-as-you-go license, so the upfront investment is minimal. The only disadvantage of cloud computing is storing terabytes of information in the cloud for decades could be very expensive over time.

Choosing Data Archiving Software

Before choosing the database archiving software, Enterprise must be sure of data that they are archiving. Another point to keep in mind while archiving is that the software lets user search required information by different contexts than just server, application/directory, and file name/email.

Generally standard data backup tool grabs a known file or email out of a known directory/application from a familiar server from one point in time whereas archive software have to grab a series of emails/files from a number of applications/directories and a number of servers, from a large range of time.

Basically, the type of data stored in the database and the business drivers for archiving have a direct impact on the tool selection criteria. For instance, if the database that are being archived to enhance the performance of the database and there is exception that archived data still needs to be accessed occasionally. In this situation, the archived data can be transparently accessed or queried without requiring special modification or restore operation.

However, organization must carefully consider the ability of the system to access the data in the future. Tools such as Database independent, data extraction and content management tools might be better suited for very long-term archives. Finally, one feature that is worth considering is the DB archiving tool's ability to unify with a backup solution. This can offer simplified, centralized data management.

Conclusion

Facts say that most of the backup software is starting to have archive retrieval capabilities; therefore, it would be wise if enterprises could have a word with backup software vendor before beginning archiving search. On top of that, it is essential to embark on a search for a proper email or file system archiving tool. As all the tools are not created equally, remember to perform a full proof-of-concept test on any such tool before implementing it.