5. You’ve heard of Hadoop and want to vote NoSQL
With major web properties handling Google-scale data volumes, Hadoop and MapReduce have been popularized as open source saviors to the Big Data problem. Additionally NoSQL is a grouping of various technologies that provide alternatives to traditional relational repositories. Many of these technologies are early and relatively immature in their enterprise business use. There are vendors offering commercial variants of these technologies today but focused on high performance analytics, not retaining and keeping Big Data online accessible and immutable.
A specialized solution for enterprise and business-class structured data retention which makes use of many of the concepts found in techniques such as MapReduce allows you to solve your retention problem today while benefiting from leveraging new technologies in the future.
4. You believe old dogs don’t have to learn new tricks
The common, yet cyclical view of IT’s evolution says that everything old is new again. Many of the technologies such as Hadoop and NoSQL have roots that can be traced back to days prior to commercial RDBMS offerings. It is a costly and time consuming endeavor to retool and train a new wave of experts in order to leverage these new technologies. The reality is that a large majority of the enterprise business world uses SQL for data access and the learning of “new tricks” are viewed as an added IT expense.
Deploying a solution that “speaks” SQL and supports standard ODBC/JDBC allows you to rapidly integrate it into your architecture by returning the exact same results from queries and reports requested through your application and BI tools.
3. Your head is in the Clouds, your body on-premise
You’ve been asked to consider Cloud options. Should you leverage data retention through a hosted offering, public, private or hybrid cloud? You’d like to deploy an offering that solves data retention problems today without precluding a hosted or cloud strategy in the future.
An online data retention solution works equally as well on-premise or in any form of hosted/cloud environment, allowing you to deploy what makes the most sense for your business.
2. You don’t want to go through this every year
Not having to say “sorry back to the drawing board” means an architectural solution that will scale indefinitely with your data volumes. Whatever your retention requirements today, you should plan for multiples of those volumes in the near future. Predicting the TCO of any solution you deploy today is critical to managing for the unexpected.
An OLDR solution scales proportionately with your data volume growth, it can parallelize ingestion and query, allowing you incremental scale as volumes dictate, while continuing to benefit from attractive economics.
1. You want to retain more AND pay less
Ultimately you want to view the Big Data retention problem as an opportunity, not a challenge. You want the highest possible de-duplication and compression, the ability to avoid fines and liabilities through configurable retention policies. You want healthy production systems without the dependency on costly hardware upgrades or additional DB administrators. You would rather not risk leveraging immature open source technologies, and fast integration, compatibility and time to market are critical for your business. You’re testing the waters with Cloud architecture, and feel that it is somewhere in your future. Finally you must benefit from the lowest possible TCO per terabyte retained.
A data retention solution can offer all of the above with concrete ROI and proof points, allowing you to justify savings and/or new business opportunities.
About the author:
Ramon Chen VP Product Management, RainStor
Ramon has 20+ years experience marketing and product managing software infrastructure tools, applications and databases. He holds a BSc (Hons) degree in computer science degree from the University of Essex.
Before joining RainStor, Ramon was VP product marketing of Siperian, a master data management software provider. Prior to Siperian, he was Sr. Director of product management and product marketing at GoldenGate Software, now Oracle. He has also been VP of marketing and product management at MetaTV; director of product and services marketing at Evolve Software and director of product management and marketing at Sterling Software.
About RainStor Inc.
RainStor is a technology pioneer in online information preservation whose specialized data repository significantly reduces the total cost of retaining data through extreme data reduction, simplified data management and near-perfect scalability on commodity hardware. RainStor solutions are deployed by technology partners across multiple industries and include Informatica, AdaptiveMobile, Group2000 and On Point Technology to reduce the cost and complexity of preserving information in the enterprise or the cloud. By embedding RainStor in industry leading solution offerings, customers achieve a 10x less total cost of ownership for long term data retention. RainStor is a privately held company with offices in San Francisco, USA and Gloucester, UK. For more information, visit www.rainstor.com or info@rainstor.com