RainStor Version 4

RainStor (Clearpace Software Ltd), an infrastructure software company providing data repository for historical data retention and on demand retrieval, announced the availability of RainStor version 4.

This new version is designed to provide greater control over information in the repository for organizations in industries with stringent compliance regulations and high standards of data governance. RainStor reduces the total cost of owning large quantities of historical data by an order of magnitude as compared with traditional databases.

Organizations across many industry sectors continue to use traditional databases to store static and historical data. While database solutions are still necessary for managing active data in production systems, they are not designed to handle large data volumes that must remain immutable and be kept online for long periods of time. Because today’s business critical applications experience extreme data growth, this in turn negatively impacts system performance and drives the need for a new class of data repository solutions to better manage and retain large data sets.

RainStor Addresses Big Data Retention,
Compliance and Retrieval, Across Industries
“Big Data is not just about analytics. Cost-effective, compliant retention is fast being recognized as the other side of the Big Data problem,” said Ramon Chen, vice president of product management, RainStor. “Traditional databases and data warehousing technologies are not optimized for long term retention of ever-growing volumes of data being generated. Organizations need a cost effective way to keep data secure, online and accessible to comply and avoid costly regulatory penalties.”

RainStor has close to 100 end-customer deployments worldwide through partners who OEM and embed RainStor into their applications. RainStor 4 capabilities were derived through feedback from key partner’s end-customers across multiple industries. For example, policy compliance regulations such as legal hold for telecommunications providers, HIPAA and Electronic Healthcare Record for healthcare, SOX for financial services and more.

Informatica is an independent provider of enterprise data integration software. Informatica partners with RainStor to deliver cost effective, online data retention solutions. “Informatica Data Archive provides customers with significant benefits by improving performance of their core applications, retiring redundant, or obsolete systems, and most importantly, ensuring compliance with strict retention regulations,” said Adam Wilson, senior vice president and general manager, Informatica. “Informatica uses RainStor as an important component of our database archive solution and we look forward to providing our customers with the additional benefits provided by RainStor 4.”

On Point Technology, Inc. is the leading independent solution provider dedicated to state workforce agencies. On Point Technology partners with RainStor to provide its state workforce agency customers with the ability to securely retain unemployment insurance claimant data. In some states data must be readily accessible for more than a decade for ongoing analysis and fraud detection. “By embedding RainStor, we can allow our customers to retain growing data volumes at a fraction of the cost. We are particularly excited about the ability to retain data in the cloud as well as on-site, and we look forward to enhancing existing solutions and creating new offerings with RainStor 4,” said Mike Lorsbach, president of On Point Technology.

RainStor 4 Features and Benefits
The growing volume and complexity of data that must be retained by organizations presents significant challenges in hardware costs, scalability and ease-of-access for fast query and analysis. Designed to run very efficiently on-premise or in the cloud, RainStor solves this challenge with a solution that requires very little bandwidth, storage, administrative, and computing resources.

Key benefits of RainStor 4 include:

• Superior Data Management: RainStor provides greater control over the ability to manage historical information retained within the repository. Data must often remain immutable in order to meet compliance rules but when and how data should be deleted, once compliance periods have ended is as critical. New features in RainStor 4 include record level expiry, legal hold by record, automatic deletion of records based on business rules and the ability to group and tag records for efficient future discovery.
• Enhanced Performance for Data Ingestion and Query: RainStor 4 can ingest very large data sets in a fraction of the time it would take for a traditional database using comparable hardware, additionally RainStor enables users the ability to run queries against stored information using SQL query or using a wide range of packaged BI and reporting solutions. RainStor 4 provides up to 50 percent improvement in ingestion and query performance as dictated by specific industry use cases.
• Extended Platform Support: RainStor supports a wide range of hardware and OS platforms and with 4 has added IBM AIX and Windows x86.