Beyond Bi

The Intelligent Storage platform

Ensure optimal performance for business and analytic intelligence with open, flexible storage options, advises Sudipta Sen.

IT organisations these days are struggling to balance efficient, reliable data collection and operational processing with the increasing information needs of their business users across the enterprise.

Traditionally, these organisations have focussed their data storage strategies on the timely and reliable collection of data. This has resulted in the widespread adoption of relational database management systems. But with the growing need of information users, increasing demands for analytic and business intelligence applications are placing unprecedented strain on these systems.

This increased demand from individual business units can create major resource bottlenecks for corporate data stores already stretched to the limit by transactional processing requests. In fact, many IT staff hours are spent providing appropriate data subsets so that end-user query and reporting do not adversely impact critical data systems.

As more business users seek their own answers and insights, the strain on traditional data storage systems becomes problematic for everyone. Business users have difficulty getting the data they need in time, and IT organisations struggle with resource needs and security issues.

To deliver more accurate intelligence to decision makers, IT departments need an open, flexible platform with a variety of storage options that ensure optimal performance of business and analytic intelligence applications while keeping the cost of ownership and maintenance under control.

An Intelligent Storage can deliver an open, flexible platform for business and analytic intelligence applications and make optimal use of existing hardware technology, is easily integrated within existing extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) processes, and delivers a lower cost of ownership for the organisation.

Providing fast ETL regardless of the amount of the data held within an organisation, an Intelligent Storage can easily integrate with the existing ETL processes and enable organisations to get maximum benefits from their current technology investments.

The need for Intelligent Storage

• Flexible, scalable and reliable

An Intelligent Storage delivers scalable storage that can easily grow with the organisation. Unlike traditional one-size-fits-all platforms, the Intelligent Storage on an open, flexible platform ensures that business and analytic intelligence can be obtained quickly by serving the data through a platform designed specifically for rapid retrieval and reporting.

• Integrated storage architecture

The Intelligent Storage can provide relational and OLAP storage options to suit all types of application profiles from simple reporting and OLAP dissemination to advanced forecasting and data mining.

• Reliable and fast ETL

While general purpose relational database management systems are designed for secure handling of concurrent updates, Intelligent Storage is built for fast and reliable throughput of large amounts of data, thus removing much of the overhead found in traditional database systems.

• Speed up analytic and business intelligence applications

With Intelligent Storage, different storage technologies can be combined in a single integrated platform without sacrificing the individual benefits of the technologies. This integrated platform can deliver information to business intelligence and analytical applications using the storage technology best suited to each application. All the technologies can be seamlessly integrated through a common metadata layer to provide the best possible performance for analytic and business intelligence applications.

• Effortless scalability as your organisation grows

The Intelligent Storage platform scales up and out to meet the expanding business needs of the organisation. As requests to the storage platform increase and the volume of stored information continues to grow, Intelligent Storage can scale up by spawning multiple threads that balance the workload across processors and storage devices.

Intelligent Storage can also scale out by pooling multiple servers and storage devices in a single cluster, further distributing and balancing workloads across all available resources.

• Lower cost of ownership

An integrated storage platform can significantly lower operational costs for an enterprise. Many aspects of Intelligent Storage can be maintained easily from a single point of control, reducing the time and effort required for IT administration. The efficient use of hardware resources further reduces the total cost of ownership.

The author is Managing Director & CEO, SAS Institute (India).

E-mail: info.india@sas.com