Informatica, an independent provider of data integration software and services, has announced that its Data Archive solution, recently acquired through the purchase of Applimation, has been certified for use with the Hitachi Content Archive Platform. Through this integration, Informatica and Hitachi provide customers with a cost-effective way to archive, store, and retrieve business critical information.
Informatica Data Archive offers a broad product portfolio for customers to cost-effectively manage the data lifecycle from data archiving to application retirement. The product incorporates a complete set of accelerators to automate the archiving of packaged applications from vendors such as Oracle, PeopleSoft and Siebel, and SAP. This application-aware information lifecycle management (ILM) software is a key differentiator for Informatica because effective lifecycle management of application data lowers storage and database costs, improves performance, and ensures confidentiality. A leading industry analyst group estimates that more than 80% of data in these enterprise applications is "inactive," yet such data consumes expensive storage and database capacity. The Informatica Data Archive software help businesses to align the value of application information with the most appropriate IT infrastructure to manage it, and enables the inactive data to be transferred to less expensive on-line storage, such as the Hitachi Archive Platform.
The Hitachi Content Archive Platform establishes an "active archive" environment-a single online repository that enables preservation, search and retrieval across numerous content types including structured and unstructured data. Based on a unique SAN-enabled architecture, known as SAN Attached Array of Independent Nodes, the Content Archive Platform fully leverages Hitachi storage and archive software capabilities for high availability, performance and multi-petabyte scalability. Together, Informatica and Hitachi lower application TCO by cost-effectively archiving historical data and ensure ongoing compliance through comprehensive e-discovery capabilities.
Adam Wilson, general manager of ILM at Informatica, tells 5 Minute Briefing that "the cost savings of transferring application data to the Hitachi Platform come from a variety of factors. First, the Hitachi Content Archive uses less expensive disk technology than that required for Tier 1 managed disk for OLTP databases. Second, the data gets massively compressed when transferred, so less overall storage capacity is required, and third the rate of growth in database license costs can be reduced because the repository in the archive does not require a relational database license. Wilson also indicates that "the active archive solution provides seamless, real-time access to archived data whenever needed by an application without requiring the user to login to a different system. This, coupled with Informatica's intimate understanding of the underlying metadata that supports mission-critical applications, and the Data Archive software's ability to relocate dormant transactions to a secondary system while maintaining their referential integrity, makes for a strong collaborative relationship with Hitachi."
For more information on Informatica and the new ILM solution, go here.