Solix EDMS Provides a Stimulus for Archiving Data in Oracle's FLEXCUBE

If you look at the amount of content within banking systems you will no doubt find data runs into the terabytes supporting both day to day transactions as well as reporting against years of historical financial information. Keeping this data available into perpetuity, especially when stored on primary storage, has created huge infrastructure, backup, and reporting costs. Simply stated:

• It is commonly reported that 70-80% of financial data is inactive; keeping this data on high-cost primary storage is wasteful and unnecessary.
• All data is not the same, especially when it comes to backups. Backing up inactive financial data along with day to day transactional data increases backup windows, the chances of failures or incomplete backups, and it costs more to manage those backups.
• Keeping all the data accessible, most often in a database, can create performance issues for the production application. The more data an application has to wade through, especially for queries, equates to more work within an application, wasted system resources, and reduced response times. For the glutinous databases that the ones used by financial systems often become, the time to execute queries and independent transactions becomes elongated and can grind application performance to unacceptably slow speeds..

Moving information from primary to secondary storage to relieve operational and performance issues is only half the issue; archiving the data is the problem. Financial institutions that might use Oracle as a back end database will find that relocating information to lower cost storage can be quite difficult.

Databases (and not just Oracle) are one of those pieces of a data center's infrastructure that have been black boxes for a long time. Attempts to use native database or software archiving capabilities typically render historical information unavailable. This leaves data disjointed and creates headaches, hardships and increased work if information is ever to be reported on in the future.

By taking advantage of tiered storage and relocating stagnate and read only data that isn't needed for day to day operations, financial institutions could find a balance between application access and performance needs, storage consumption, and costs as well as take steps toward becoming more compliant.

Attacking the issue head on, Solix and Oracle have announced that Oracle Financial Services Software Group is OEMing Solix's Enterprise Data Management System (EDMS) software in its FLEXCUBE product to help automate the archiving of application and database information to a separate environment consisting of lower tiered storage.

Through a set of policies, rules, and templates, Solix EDMS archiving can be done on a per module basis or across the application to archive information and relieve primary storage. The creation of metadata and mappings done between applications and conversion rules controls the archiving process as well as ensures that archived information can still be accessed by the primary application and database. This provides the following benefits:

• Cutting costs through reductions in primary storage, backup, and server capacities by reducing backup windows and lengthening the service of existing servers.
• Quickly and accurately helping institutions comply with today's more stringent regulatory requirements. Solix's EDMS technology allows all data to be online to help in litigation, compliance, and eDiscovery.
• Improving system performance and response times by keeping the FLEXCUBE database as slim as possible by reducing the amount of data in the application database.

In the past, Oracle, and many other database have become involved in acquisitions, mergers, and partnerships that seem to never take root, fizzle, or completely satisfy a business requirement. As a provider of enterprise data management solutions that successfully help organizations meet compliance requirements and achieve Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) goals and strategies, Solix EDMS overcomes the shortcomings of native application and databases options of archiving as it provides access to archived information. Let's hope that this partnership goes beyond the superficial as the need to have archived data readily available surely exists and will more than likely increase dramatically over time.