In my last post, I discussed how a Nearline 2.0 solution allows vast amounts of detail data to be accessed at speeds that rival the per-formance of online systems, which in turn gives business analysts the power to assess and fine-tune important business initiatives on the basis of actual historical facts. We saw that the promise of Nearline 2.0 is basically to give you all the data you want, when and how you want it — without compromising the performance of existing warehouse reporting systems.

Today, I want to consider what this capability means specifically for a business. What are the concrete benefits of implementing Nearline 2.0? Here are a few of the most important ones.

Nearline 2.0 enables you to keep all your valuable data available for analysis.

Having more data accessible – more details, covering longer periods – enables a number of improvements in Business Intelligence processes:

• A clearer understanding of emerging trends in the business – what will go well in the future as well as what is now “going south”
• Better support for iterative analyses, enabling more intensive Business Performance Management (BPM)
• Better insight into customer behavior over the long term
• More precise target marketing, bringing a three- to five-fold improvement in campaign yield

Nearline 2.0 enables you to dramatically increase information storage and maintain service levels without increasing costs or administration requirements.

• Extremely high compression rates give the ability to store considerably more information in a given hardware configuration
• A substantially reduced data footprint means much faster data processing, enabling effective satisfaction of Service Level Agreements without extensive investments in processing power
• Minimal administration requirements bring reductions in resource costs, and ensure that valuable IT and business resources will not be diverted from important tasks just to manage and maintain the Nearline 2.0 implementation
• High data compression also substantially reduces the cost of maintaining a data center by reducing requirements for floor space, air conditioning and so on.

Nearline 2.0 simplifies and accelerates Disaster Recovery scenarios.

A reduced data footprint means more data can be moved across existing networks, making Nearline 2.0 an ideal infrastructure for implementing and securing an offsite backup process for massive amounts of data,

Nearline 2.0 keeps all detail data in an immutable form, available for delivery on request.

Having read-only detail data available on-demand enables quick response to audit requests, avoiding the possibility of costly penal-ties for non-compliance. Optional security packages can be used to control user access to the data.

Nearline 2.0 makes it easy to offload data from the online database before making final decisions about what is to be moved to an archiving solution.

The traditional archiving process typically involves extensive analysis of data usage patterns in order to determine what should be moved to relatively inaccessible archival storage. With a Nearline 2.0 solution, it’s a simple matter to move large amounts of data out of the online database — thereby improving performance and guaranteeing satisfaction of SLA’s, — while still keeping the data avail-able for access when required. Data that is determined to be no longer used, but which still needs to be kept around to comply with data retention policies or regulations, can then be easily moved into an archiving solution. For more consideration of the differences between Nearline 2.0 and traditional archiving, see Arthur’s recent blog post.

Taken together, these benefits make a strong case for implementing a Nearline 2.0 solution when the data tsunami threatens to overwhelm the enterprise data warehouse. In future posts, I will be investigating each of these in more detail.

Richard Grondin