Enterprise applications by their very nature are big and consume huge amounts of corporate network resources. Particularly storage. Application data is ever growing, and backups, replications and data snapshots all can require large amounts of storage space.
As data sets grow, enterprise systems can grow sluggish. One way to fix the problem is to upgrade hardware, adding faster servers, more memory and more storage space, but the solution is usually only a temporary one until once again system limitations are exceeded.
A better solution is to periodically migrate data from the enterprise system to an archival location. Typically the data selected for archival is older and no longer critical to the business. But identifying the database tables and rows that are candidates for archival can be difficult and usually involves assistance from DBAs with input from a business analyst.
Two types of approaches are possible for performing data archival: static and dynamic.
Dynamic archival will move the data to a typically cheaper and slower storage medium but still be saved in a mirrored set of relational tables. In this way, the archived data, if desired, could be queried exactly the same way as the data kept in the production system. While the speed for retrieval of the archived data may be significantly slower than that of the production data, it is a reasonable trade-off since it is assumed that the archived data will only be infrequently accessed.
Static archival is when archival data is moved into static, file-based storage. The approach is simpler than dynamic archival and it may be preferred because dynamic archival methods are not certified by the government for long-term archival.
The Formtek | Orion RepositoryLink (RL) product is a good example of a static archival product that integrates with and is certified by SAP. RL is based on SAP’s ArchiveLink interface and can be configured to store more than 600 of SAP’s archivable objects.
Formtek’s RL writes SAP archive files that include important metadata. The archive file isn’t in the format of a database table, but one that does completely capture all business transaction information complete with metadata tags. Once the SAP archive files are written, that same information, if desired, can be removed from SAP’s production database. SAP archived data within Formtek’s RL can then be securely managed.
