The Data Warehouse Challenge

Maintaining good data warehouse performance in the face of steady increases in data volume and diversity, while still keeping costs under control, is a major challenge for today’s organizations.

New legal regulations, evolving data provisioning requirements, mergers, acquisitions and other developments can produce a significant increase in the volume and diversity of the data that organizations need to manage. The resulting “data explosion” has a direct impact on the manageability, performance and cost of maintaining a data warehouse. Studies demonstrate that less than 30 percent of the data kept in data warehouses is actively used, and that maintaining large amounts of inactive data in a data warehouse can significantly compromise performance in terms of both query processing and administrative operations such as index reorganization, batch process execution and backups.

The SAND/DNA Access Solution

“SAND/DNA allowed us to effectively archive, rapidly access and extensively analyze huge amounts of very complex data.”— Mark Spear, LENNON Program Director, Atos Origin

SAND/DNA Access, implemented alongside an Oracle data warehouse, enables the extension and enhancement approach and helps to solve many problems that currently plague data warehouses, such as:

  • Performance degradation due to continued storage of aged data online within existing hardware and software environments
  • Performance degradation due to continued storage of detailed data online, even when analysis is carried out only on aggregate dataLoss of direct access to the data when it is moved to tape
  • Difficulty and high cost of introducing new data elements into the environment
  • Administrative complexity due to the need to replicate data in multiple locations.

Benefits

The SAND approach brings a wide range of benefits to an Oracle data warehouse environment, including:

  • Transparency: The ability to continue to use and develop applications as if all the data involved resided in the main data warehouse
  • Heterogeneity: The ability to accommodate a variety of data requirements
  • Autonomy: Removal of data access restrictions, and provision of direct access to archived data
  • Extensibility and openness: The ability to integrate and maintain more data
  • Optimized performance: Improved performance of the existing data warehouse by keeping only a portion of the data online, without compromising the accessibility of the entire data set
  • Security: Security management using Oracle authentication, access controls and audit trails.

More Information

For more information on how SAND/DNA can help you Reduce TCO, increase performance, and meet Service Level Agreements, please complete and submit the following form (fields marked with * are mandatory):

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Customer Success

Atos Origin was selected to design, build and operate the UK rail settlement system, which allocates more than £3.5 billion in annual passenger revenue to Britain’s passenger train operators.

Business Challenge

An extremely complex system, when allowance is made for backups to enable disaster recovery, the total amount of data to be stored over a 15-year period is estimated at 28 terabytes. Atos Origin recognized that the traditional approach to data warehouse management could not adequately cope with the massive volumes of data that were quickly accumulating, while still maintaining the required degree of service to users.

SAND/DNA Solution

Atos Origin chose to deploy SAND/DNA to leverage the strengths of the existing Oracle data warehouse, by freeing it from the need to support too much data and to process queries that are too complex for its design.

The SAND solution has delivered a number of benefits to Atos Origin, the most important being that it has enabled the company to cost-effectively meet its contractual requirements and stringent SLA’s. The SAND solution has also brought a massive reduction in the overall cost of data management by efficiently partitioning the active data accumulated by the ATOC between an online server and a nearline archive from which it can be restored quickly and easily.



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