Profile Were as aware as anyone of the exponential growth enterprises are coping with in the amount of data they store online. As the price-per-megabyte of magnetic disk storage continues its steady fall, companies cant seem to resist adding more capacity, and them some more. What we didnt know is that, as OuterBay claims, important app such as those from Oracle and PeopleSoft often accumulate so much data that their performance gets bogged down. As much as 60% of the data they keep online is inactive, which ties up resources and can lead to unnecessary spending of most expensive forms of disk.
OuterBay s software is designed to transparently move inactive data to cheaper disk based on a fairly deep "understanding" of specific apps data schemas. Thus, the software can determine which of the 10,000 database tables that PerpleSoftss enterprise resource planning (ERP) software uses are active at any time and which of those can be moved to new, less expensive disk location. The software does not archive data to mag tape, but on to disk.
OuterBay has identified several reasons for their being so much inactive data on hand. In many cases, software makers add tables to new versions of their products in an effort to get their customers to switch on new functions and up their license fees. The move from Oracles 10.7 products to one called 11i, OuterBay tells us, results in a tripling of the data stored on disk. But even if a customer does not use the new function, the tables get populated with data, which sits unused. Another factor is that many customers have heeded the call to sweep up data from many disparate systems to create a global view of their operations. Finally, investors whove witnessed Enron-like meltdowns are demanding that companies be ready to audit their operations in detail at the drop of a hat, which requires still more data online.
OuterBay says that despite its products being able to save a customers such as Applied Materials some $2 million in storage costs in one year, storage hardware providers actually feel warmly about OuterBay. The reason, the company maintains, is that with disk storage becoming a commodity product, the hardware providers need value-add offerings to fatten their margins. None has signed on as a partner, yet, though.
The companys next move will be to add support for SAPs ERK software and Siebel Systems customer relationship management (CRM) suite. This entails digging deep in to the products data schemas and writing a set of policies that can automatically determine where to move database tables as the become inactive or active. With those two vendors added to its list, OuterBay reckons it has a potential market of some 40,000 users.
