LESSON - Weathering the Perfect Storm
By Pete Benesh, Product Marketing Manager, Syncsort
The Perfect Storm
Growing data volumes, shrinking operational
windows, and the demand for low-latency
data have created the perfect storm for data
integration (DI) and data warehousing (DW)
environments. In the face of this storm, IT
departments fight a constant battle to provide
a single, consistent, and current version
of the truth readily accessible throughout
the enterprise. This organizational pursuit
supports one goal: maintaining a competitive
advantage.
The battle often begins with the implementation
of an enterprise DI strategy, which can
include data warehouses, data marts, DI
technologies, metadata management capabilities,
a metadata repository, data quality, and
profiling capabilities. Organizations commit
significant capital and resources to build an
environment customized for their specific
data formats, sources, business relationships,
processes, and service-level agreements.
But even environments implemented using
best practices and modern technologies feel
the pressure of the perfect storm. When this
pressure is compounded with the fact that
most DI software is not sufficiently optimized
for performance, it causes bottlenecks within
the infrastructure that can have severe consequences
to the business—lost revenue
opportunities, increased costs, impaired
decision making, and customer attrition.
Although DI bottlenecks manifest in different
ways and in different architectural
environments, they are all characterized by
an inability to transform, integrate, or move
data in a resource-efficient and scalable way
within required timeframes. Some common
scenarios that breed bottlenecks include:
- Building and maintaining large enterprise
data warehouses
- Integrating data from many disparate
sources into a single semantic format
- Daily data loads that support mission-critical
enterprise business applications
- Application modernization/migration
initiatives
- Clickstream data warehousing initiatives
for Web analytics
- Various other scenarios that involve
processing large data volumes in short
operational windows
Rethink Data Integration
It is crucial to minimize or eliminate DI performance
bottlenecks before they impact
the business. The key is finding a solution
that is optimized to function within existing
DI environments, complementing an existing
environment while solving data performance
problems.
Most important, to effectively
eliminate bottlenecks caused by
the perfect storm, the solution
must also provide extreme DI
performance.
Ideally, the solution should be implemented
in such a way that is resource efficient,
does not require significant investment in
additional software and hardware, and is
not disruptive to the company’s existing DI
environment. For this reason, traditional
approaches such as acquiring additional software
licenses, investing in extra hardware, or
developing custom-coded tools are not the
answer. Similarly, ripping out and replacing
an expensive enterprisewide system is also
not viable.
The solution should replace existing
custom code and require short end-to-end
implementation times. Most important, to
effectively eliminate bottlenecks caused by
the perfect storm, the solution must also
provide extreme DI performance, with the
ability to:
- Process massive data sets in the shortest
elapsed time
- Leverage a minimum resource footprint
on commodity hardware
- Dynamically optimize processing based
on runtime data and system resource
availability
An extreme performance DI solution that
complements an existing DI environment will
transform decision making in increasingly
complex business situations and provide
immense measurable value by:
- Enabling new and increased revenue
streams
- Eliminating revenue losses caused by
processing bottlenecks
- Reducing operating costs
- Delivering rapid time-to-value
- Extracting more value from existing
infrastructure investments
- Eliminating costs associated with
custom-coded solutions
Conclusion
Data performance problems occur within
even the most carefully planned and well-executed
DI environments. Highly efficient
software optimized for performance within
existing environments can eliminate these
bottlenecks in a resource-efficient and
scalable manner, without requiring costly rip-and-replace endeavors, large investments in
additional hardware and software, or custom
programming techniques. By easing the cost
and effort of delivering rapid information to
decision makers, the right solution will enable
customers to effectively pursue strategic
initiatives around revenue growth, customer
acquisition and retention, cost reduction, and
operational efficiency.
For a free white paper on this topic from Syncsort, click here and choose the title “Addressing the Destructive Business Impact of Data Performance Problems: Nondisruptive Strategies for Eliminating Performance Problems in Existing Data Integration Environments.” For more free white papers, click here.