Never Miss a Beat: Get a snapshot of the issues affecting the IT industry straight to your inbox.
RainStor 4 Improves Compliance Storage Costs, Accessibility For TransactionsRainStor 4 Improves Compliance Storage Costs, Accessibility For Transactions
RainStor 4 makes saving and retrieving from large volumes of old transaction data significantly less expensive not just in storage capacity but also reducing IT database admin costs.
3 Min Read
RainStor 4 makes saving and retrieving from large volumes of old transaction data significantly less expensive not just in storage capacity but also reducing IT database admin costs.For activities that involve lots of transactions, e.g., sales, financial activities, telephone logs, the number of records created can get significant. This in turn means continually growing database sizes -- most of which won't be changed, and may never be looked at again in the course of normal business.
But government and industry compliance mandates mean hanging onto this historical data -- and being able to query and retrieve records in a timely fashion on demand. For SMBs, this can mean not only undesired but non-negotiable ongoing costs, but also IT overhead beyond their on-hand expertise. Overly large database size also drags down system performance.
Based on software originally developed for the United Kingdom Department of Defense, RainStor's RainStor software, helps reduce the cost and complications of managing this data, including through extreme compression, deduplication and other techniques.
According to Ramon Chen, VP of product management at RainStor, reductions of 40:1 to 100:1 are possible. "We're at the structured level, we don't deduplicate at the unstructured block level," Chen notes. "We may compete with Oracle for historical data, we are often used to support Oracle. And we compete with tape."
RainStor is available embedded on-premises or in the cloud through ISVs such as Informatica, On Point Technology, and EMC's Atmos private cloud.
"We focus on transactions," says Chen. "We deduplicate using a special patented process where we throw out all the duplicates while maintaining the integrity of the records. Think of this as a specialized database, focused on the ability to store large volumes of historical data in a very cost effective manner. Our partners lets verticals like hospitals and financial organizations retain large amounts of data cost-effectively."
With version 4 of its RainStor software, announced June 9, 2010, RainStor has added features to reduce data volume and approve queryability, including:
Record-level deletion based on expiration of compliance periods or other rules. "Version 4 provides even more flexible ability to not only retain data but also purge it when it's aged out and compliance periods are over," says Chen.
Grouping and tagging records for easier future discovery. "We let you annotate around records, e.g. 'I'm keeping this because...'" says Chen. "We are bringing this capability to transactions. Faster 'data ingestion and queries.' "We have to be able to 'ingest' billions of records per day, which relational databases can't handle," says Chen. We've increased this by up to fifty percent, and also improved the query performance using SQL Query. Support for more platforms, including Windows x86 and IBM AIX (which were previously supported using virtual machines under Linux).
RainStor also addresses the administrative costs of storage, which typically outweigh other aspects. "Once you have deployed RainStor, you don't have to touch it, unlike relational databases, which need ongoing administration," says Chen.
Don't Miss: Google Gives Amazon S3 A Run For Its Money
About the Author
You May Also Like
More Insights
