Features - Storage Innovations:

StorageTek POWERS ADVANCED ARCHIVING WITH LIFECYCLE DIRECTOR

As today's enterprise DB2 databases continue to grow exponentially, database administrators seek the elusive balance between effective data management and cost efficiency. Finally, there is a data management yin to the DB2 administrator's yang.

StorageTek (Storage Technology Corp) announced the introduction of its Lifecycle Director for DB2 archive solution for IBM mainframe databases. With StorageTek's Lifecycle Director software, DB2 managers in enterprise OS/390 or z/OS environments can automate the transparent movement of data through its lifecycle to lower-cost storage media while delivering extremely rapid access to archived data.

"As enterprises' critical DB2 databases continue to grow, the associated archiving complexities and storage management costs have surged," said J.R. Roedel, StorageTek senior director of Information Lifecycle Management Solutions. "With Lifecycle Director archive solution we have directly applied our information lifecycle management strategy to a challenging real-world scenario and developed an effective solution for archive-enabling DB2 environments to reduce costs and enhance overall operational performance."

StorageTek developed Lifecycle Director as the industry's leading-edge DB2 archive solution that eliminates the need for users to manually modify the underlying application code. This resource-intensive process can eclipse the cost savings and reductions in management complexity promised via competing DB2 archive products and homegrown applications. With its unique, row-level management and migration functionality, Lifecycle Director delivers archiving and recall flexibility and automation capabilities with a minimum of setup and configuration.

StorageTek's Lifecycle Director enables DB2 administrators to achieve the following:

• Reduce Storage Media and Management Costs. Lifecycle Director enables administrators to automate the transparent movement of older or less frequently accessed files from expensive disk storage systems to lower cost storage media, including StorageTek Automated Tape Solutions, and maintain Nearline-speed data recall. Additionally, Lifecycle Director greatly reduces the management costs associated with archiving large DB2 databases by eliminating the need to manually update the underlying application code and minimizing data retrieval times.
• Conserve Valuable Disk Storage Resources. By facilitating the transparent archiving and recall of data at the individual row level, Lifecycle Director can reduce active table sizes by an average of 85 percent and eliminate the over allocation of disk storage space. In this way, administrators can conserve valuable disk storage resources and readily accommodate peak data processing and continued data growth.
• Deliver Rapid Disaster Recovery/Data Recoverability. Recovering large tables from disk failures or disasters can mean hours to days of downtime, and commonly the most recent and frequently accessed data is restored last. With Lifecycle Director, data is available at Nearline response times as soon as the application is active at the recovery site. Also, its architecture allows the disk copy to be restored in "last in first out" row sequence. Lifecycle Director automates the replication of up to four tape copies via single and concurrent tape write operations, enabling a broad range of onsite/offsite data replication and protection strategies.
• Facilitate Regulatory Compliance For applications affected by regulatory compliance requirements, Lifecycle Director can be configured to automate the migration of data to archival storage media based on highly customizable data retention policies. Additionally, Lifecycle Director can be used to migrate sensitive data to StorageTek's advanced VolSafe WORM (write once read many) tape media, designed to support today's stringent electronic data storage regulations.

According to Charlie Garry, senior program director at META Group, a of IT research, advisory services and strategic consulting, "Database archival growth has been a costly -- but important -- challenge to database administrators for a while. Lifecycle Director offers an interesting approach and could prove quite valuable to large enterprises seeking a cost effective way to manage this challenge."