Benefits of Active Storage Manager

Cost Control

One of the most significant benefits of IEE Active Storage Manager is cost control, whether you operate in a cloud-based environment or an on-premises environment. Active Storage Manager gives you the flexibility to buy the speed you specifically need, and then adding only what is required for basic storage.

For cloud operations, you have dozens of tiers of disk storage available to you. Each of them, based on size, can give you (with corresponding price increases) from 3,000 to 20,000 IO operations per second.

For on-premises operations, you likewise can choose the numbers and types of disk drives to include in your high-end Storage Area Networks. Active Storage Manager gives you options for reducing the number of premium solid-state drives you actually need in favor of lower-cost standard solid-state and hard drives in your arrays. This potentially reduces costs from 40 to 50 percent when you optimize your disk storage.

Integrated Task Management

Active Storage Manager provides several other benefits by integrating with other IEE components. The module is aware of the IEE's ongoing Day-in-the-Life operations, such as data collection windows, reading import operations, and so on. Its functions can therefore be scheduled around the heaviest operations occurring each day.

The module itself is scheduled using a task template like all other IEE functions, so no additional expertise is required to operate it, other than understanding which parameters to include. Because Active Storage Manager is a task like all other tasks, it records its functions in IEE’s audit logs, and exceptions can be reviewed using the Task Manager.

Finally, Active Storage Manager does not change how IEE natively accesses historical data. You may experience a slight reduction in application responsiveness, but that is normally not an issue for this type of data.

Resource Use

The focus of faster storage tiers or SAN arrays to the most recent data means increased import/export performance for the most frequently used data according to system needs, such as billing, customer presentment, exception analysis, and so on.

Since Active Storage Manager uses the capabilities of your existing IEE database, you do not need any additional separate database licenses for either Oracle or SQL Server, which saves you money.

Finally, with Active Manager you can use standard DBMS compression techniques to move data between tiers further reducing storage footprint. This creates another cost savings by reducing the overall amount of storage you need to buy. For example:

  • Advanced Compression in Oracle can reduce storage needs on average by approximately 55%.

  • Basic Compression in Oracle can reduce storage needs by approximately 40%.

  • Page Compression in SQL Server can reduce storage needs by approximately 80%.

  • Row Compression in SQL Server can reduce storage needs by approximately 15% to 30%.