InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

Rich Butterfield, OuterBay's chief operating officer, says the tool works by automatically capturing data as it's purged from an Oracle database. That data is added to a second database that contains as many years of business records as a company wants, he says. Unlike traditional tape backup, the OuterBay software lets users view archived data as if it were still part of the live, or production, database.

Wayne Kernochan, Aberdeen Group senior VP, says the OuterBay offering is unique. "It's certainly a new idea, and a smart one," he says. The most impressive thing about it, he says, is that "it looks to the user like it's still one Oracle database, when it's really two running side by side. It's really an efficient way to scale a large database."

The OuterBay software was deployed at Sun last fall. Sean Meighan, manager of performance and architecture for Sun's enterprise resource planning systems, says the software solves a sticky problem for his company. "We have a requirement that our people be able to see every transaction back seven years," he says. "Tape backup just doesn't allow us to do that."

Meighan says any number of the 2,000 employees who use Sun's ERP or database applications can simultaneously access archived data. Employees often work with one window open on the live database and another open on the archive database; they simply log on to either one, or both. "The data is available to them all the time," he says, "and nobody has to wait until someone gets the time to restore a backup tape for them."

Archiving the company's databases, which contain millions of rows of data, is done one day during the weekend, so the live database is never down when employees need it. The archive database, which runs on a separate Sun Solaris system, already contains more than 300 million rows of data.

Conversion to the new archive system required no employee training, Meighan says, because the same apps employees use every day are used to access the archive database. And upgrades and patches to the Oracle apps aren't a problem: Sun applies any upgrades or patches to the archive database and the live database.