Data Archiving for Adabas by Software AG

Software AG announced the availability of Data Archiving for Adabas – a tool that lowers the operating costs of Adabas on any platform by removing infrequently used data from the production database and storing it into a long-term archive.

Data Archiving for Adabas provides automated archiving functions and robust tools for search, verification, extraction, restore and recovery. In this way, Data Archiving for Adabas helps organizations meet current and emerging data retention requirements such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II and others while reducing the load on the production database.
 
"Our customers asked for a solution that would not only reduce the size of their production databases but comply with data retention requirements and we delivered," said Dr. Peter Kuerpick, Chief Product Officer and Member of the Executive Board, Software AG. "With as much as 85 percent of database content typically dormant, organizations can save money, boost response time, and increase availability with the use of Data Archiving for Adabas. By just taking the data they don’t need every day, removing it from their production database and storing it in a vault for future reference or audit, customers can reduce the load on their production database and save up to 30 percent in storage costs."
 
Proactive Compliance
Most companies have multiple Adabas databases, often on different servers. Any audit would necessitate a costly data ‘dump’ from multiple databases and a painful, inefficient data search. With Data Archiving for Adabas, database administrators can remove terabytes of historical and infrequently used data from multiple production databases and deposit it into a ‘vault’. The vault can be another Adabas database or a set of intelligently managed files on Linux, UNIX, Windows or Mainframe platforms. Since archives from multiple Adabas databases are stored in a single storage vault and archived data is now searchable using an embedded query function, the cost and time for search and retrieval in the case of audit is minimized since everything is in one archive repository. Through this consolidation, users are also able to proactively discover data holes or overlap before compliance-related issues arise.
 
Cost Savings
With Data Archiving for Adabas, the data is deleted in the source database as soon as it is stored safely in the vault thus decreasing the size of the production database. This produces cost savings from reduced consumption of Direct Access Storage Devices (DASD) and Central Processing Unit (CPU) resources. By only keeping needed information on the production database, less storage device elements are required to be searched and less CPU is required to perform calculations and processes. For some organizations, moving infrequently used data onto less expensive storage devices creates savings by deferring hardware upgrades.
 
Improved Performance
By archiving data from the production database with Data Archiving for Adabas, users will experience faster Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) application performance because of the reduced load on the CPU. This also reduces the time required to perform backups and database reorganizations thus improving system availability. Data Archiving for Adabas also provides a filter which allows users to select the most important data to archive. This fine-grained capability reduces the time and storage required for archiving while still reducing the CPU load on the production database.
 
"Software AG’s technology has helped us reduce the amount of data in the production environment saving us money on DASD, CPU and chargeback costs," said Mike Conena, Database Administrator for The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services. Their MassHealth eligibility system, or MA21 – MassHealth application for the 21st century – is a system developed in Adabas/Natural that determines whether residents who can’t afford health insurance are eligible for benefits. More than one million state residents are recipients of some MassHealth benefit. EOHHS is the biggest user of Software AG products within the state and The MA21 System is growing quickly. According to Conena, "our MA21 application still has all of its data since it’s inception in 1998. Data Archiving for Adabas will help us reduce the size of the production database yet still retain key data in case it’s needed again."
 
With an intuitive browser-based user interface, Data Archiving for Adabas enables database administrators to perform all necessary tasks to establish the archive environment, define actions, archive unattended, search, recall and validate data with little to no training. Data Archiving for Adabas provides built-in restart and recovery in case an archiving action is interrupted – no extensive procedure is required. With the time savings provided by the automated functions, database administrators save time and are free to tackle other tasks.