EMC Perspective
Application Database Archiving
Managing database growth, costs,
and performance
An EMC perspective on the business and IT value of
application database archiving
Table of Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2
Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2
Solution requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3
EMC DatabaseXtender success . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4
EMC DatabaseXtender solution benefits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7
EMC uses DatabaseXtender to manage database growth
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Introduction
For those enterprises with mission-critical databases, database archiving has rapidly
become a necessity, not an option. Application database archiving solves a number of
seemingly unrelated issues. These include improving the performance and availability of
live production databases, managing data retention policies, conforming to government
regulations, and preserving database data as long as required. Most importantly, database
archiving helps keep businesses running and lowers infrastructure costs.
It was these benefits that prompted the EMC IT organization to asses its own requirements
for growth, accessibility, cost, and performance. EMC IT realized it needed a different
approach to managing the growth, performance, and accessibility of database information.
It needed a robust and rich database archiving solution that would address five primary
business requirements:
• Fulfill both operational and informational requests
• Enable the retention and ongoing administration of data
• Employ storage and other IT assets more efficiently and effectively
• Significantly lower hardware infrastructure costs
• Provide IT management with a predictable view of growth
The IT department chose the company’s own product, EMC® DatabaseXtenderTM. EMC
DatabaseXtender helped the group create an overall database archiving strategy to solve the
ongoing database problems of performance and growth, while reducing data inventory costs.
Challenges
The EMC IT organization realized that due to a large and busy enterprise environment, its
live Oracle Applications 11i production database environment could become too large too
quickly for servers to handle; specifically, the indexes could become too large to keep in
memory and would slow down the environment drastically. In addition, closed-out data
within the Oracle Applications was remaining in the production database environment
longer than necessary—in fact, it was never moved at all.
The environment also was assessed as having unnecessarily large data stores that were
suffering from poor performance. Before the DatabaseXtender solution was implemented,
EMC’s Oracle Applications 11.0.3 database was growing at a rate of 24 GB/month and had
more than doubled since going live with the applications. The vast majority of this growth,
approximately 88 percent, was specifically coming from increases in Inventory, BOM, and
genealogy data stores.
This kind of unbridled data growth resulted in performance degradations that created an
unstable and unpredictable application environment. This instability had an impact on
order management and product bookings at quarter- and year-end affecting sales revenue
and company performance.
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The growth also required the IT organization to increase storage expenses to buy more
disks and capacity to keep pace with the production environment growth. An additional 13
environments were regularly created as full-size copies (in other words, refreshes or
replicated copies) from the production database. Ramesh Razdan, application and
database senior manager, called this the “multiplier effect,” and said, “The growth of the
production environment itself was only a small part of the equation. We needed to create
these additional environments from the production side for development, test, and data
protection to occur without disrupting the primary data. This compelled us to utilize more
database administration resources to manage the overall growth and complexity.”
13 additional environments are regularly created as full-size copies from production
Instead of continuing to add disks, servers, and people to handle its Oracle Applications
11i environment, EMC IT chose a growth management strategy consisting of intelligent
application database archiving.
Solution requirements
Once the database environment problems were identified and their impact on overall
business performance was keenly understood, the solution requirements became very
clear. The IT organization needed an application database archiving solution to meet this
minimum set of requirements for the data relocation project. The solution needed to:
• Include user-definable archiving policies to match business objectives
• Relocate rarely accessed historical data out of the production database
• Maintain transparent visibility and access of the relocated or archived data to the user
community
• Maintain/improve system performance
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• Minimize future investments of storage
• Minimize development tuning and DBA costs
• Include the ability to scale with increased growth rates
The other point that was clear to EMC’s IT organization was that database archiving did not
mean nor should it be confused with being a backup solution. An archive is still the original
production data, not a copy of the data that has been made for data protection purposes.
Therefore, backup solutions did not apply.
EMC DatabaseXtender success
EMC DatabaseXtender helped the EMC IT organization migrate transaction data from its live
Oracle Application production databases to realtime archives based on a set of rules and
policies. DatabaseXender also enables the group to manage the integrity and accessibility
of the transaction data in those archives.
The EMC IT organization used DatabaseXtender Analyzer to discover the capacity and growth
across the entire Oracle 11i Application database environment and to produce a well-defined
snapshot of which applications needed immediate attention. DatabaseXtender Analyzer, a
part of the DatabaseXtender family, monitors application database growth and reports on
application performance.
Specifically, DatabaseXtender Analyzer provided an Oracle Application module distribution
breakdown of the data. This breakdown enabled the IT organization to make informed
decisions about what archiving policies to apply in order to deal with projected ERP growth
across the production instance, production copies, and test copies environment of 3.5TB to
11TB over a five year period.
Capacity discovery breakdown of the ERP database environment
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Once applications and data were discovered and analyzed, the IT organization embarked
on establishing data relocation policies that would effectively manage the data relocation
process. The analytics showed that the biggest growth areas were found in the Oracle
Inventory, BOM, WIP, WF, MRP, and Custom modules. EMC IT decided to retain four months
of production data and relocate anything older than four months on a monthly basis. All the
other modules would remain in an “as is” state until they demonstrated similar growth.
After moving DatabaseXtender into production, the IT organization saw a reduction of 51
percent during the first year in the overall primary storage space across all the Oracle
Applications. After a few months of continuous data relocation or archiving, the IT
organization found that, on average, it was relocating 20 GB per month to a database
archive. Initially, the relocation reduced the production environment by 355 GB.
The impact of DatabaseXtender on the size and scale of the IT database environment was
significant. Using the DatabaseXtender solution to identify, classify, and relocate
application production data older than four months substantially reduced the combined
production and non-production data growth path to 1.8TB in the first year and to 4.5TB in
the fifth year—a reduction of over 50 percent.
Using DatabaseXtender to relocate rarely accessed data has enabled EMC
to greatly reduce total ERP storage
EMC DatabaseXtender solution benefits
Slimming down a mission-critical application database by migrating closed transactions to
an accessible archive can yield significant savings which can be categorized as “hard” and
“soft.” Regardless of the category, the EMC IT organization considers all of the benefits
important to the overall success and impact that DatabaseXtender has delivered to its
production database environments.
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“Hard” DatabaseXtender Savings/Benefits
• Significant reduction in planned tape expenditures
• Reduced tape expense budget
• Total cost avoidance projected over five years > $2.3 M
• Reduction of new hardware expenditures, specifically a new Symmetrix® pair
• Specifically for non-production environments
• Savings of $480K
“Soft” DatabaseXtender Savings/Benefits
• Avoidance of reactive time employees spend with database performance tuning
• Significant reduction in service tickets associated with performance
• Production data stores benefit from its lightened load of transactions
• Predictable performance of Oracle Applications
• During peak windows, CPU utilization stays between 30% and 50%
• No month/quarter/year-end performance issues
• Queries on non-production data no longer compete with production transactions by
being redirected to the active archive
• Reduction in DBA time required to refresh environments
• 2.5 to 3 days down to 1 to 1.5 days
• Reductions in production data enable reasonable response times
• Immediate improvements to SLA performance
• Production environment SLA terms and criteria are protected from penalties
• Separate SLAs for production and archived data
• Archived data is still online to an end user via queries or natively through the original
applications
• Management and cost benefits
• Both the production database and the archived data can be optimized and scale
independently making it easier to manage the performance and growth of each
• Archived data can use high-capacity, lower-cost-effective disk (in other words,
SATA) without performance considerations
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Summary
Using DatabaseXtender has enabled the EMC IT organization to significantly slim down
databases by identifying files that have not been accessed in a set period of time and
moving them to secondary storage. Moving data out of the primary database frees up the
database server’s processing power for running reports, retrieving data, and backing up
new information, and it improves performance
“Due to the nature of structured data, it’s important that whatever you do with it, you don’t
disrupt the relational aspect of data indices and tables during the archive process.
DatabaseXtender has performed very well in the area of data integrity,” states Razdan.
DatabaseXtender has helped the EMC IT organization to improve performance of
mission-critical database applications and as a result reduce infrastructure costs around
servers and storage. The solution also improves the overall manageability of data
protection, replication, and software upgrade operations.
EMC Corporation
Hopkinton
Massachusetts
01748-9103
1-508-435-1000
In North America 1-866-464-7381
EMC2, EMC, Symmetrix, and where information
lives are registered trademarks and
DatabaseXtender is a trademark of EMC
Corporation. All other trademarks used herein
are the property of their respective owners.
© Copyright 2007 EMC Corporation.
All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 1/07
EMC Perspective
S12170107V1
www.EMC.com
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