Motorola rolls out database management software

Computerworld - Motorola Inc. announced today that it has completed the second phase of a four-phase rollout of information life-cycle management (ILM) software that cut its production database size by as much as 50% in some business divisions -- allowing it to stave off additional server and storage purchases while consolidating its hardware infrastructure.
The multimillion-dollar rollout also allows Motorola to better meet the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act by keeping data online and easily accessible without eating up space on production servers, according to Bill Brewer, Global IT Configuration Manager for Motorola's Personal Communication Sector.
Motorola is using the Application Data Management (ADM) suite from Cupertino, Calif.-based OuterBay Technologies Inc. to manage data growth in its Oracle Corp. e-business applications by automatically migrating historical customer account information from production databases to high-end storage from EMC Corp.
"As Oracle applications mature, you use more disk space ... so you will be taxing your database at a higher level," Brewer said. "There's only so much tuning you can do. So it's either rip the data out or do something else."
Motorola has set the ILM application's policy engine to migrate historical data that hasn't been accessed for 15 months.
Schaumburg, Ill.-based Motorola said it originally rolled out Outerbay's software in its China operations in 2001 and was able to reduce its production database size by 50%. That led to the data consolidation at its North American data center. It completed the North America rollout of the software in mid-July and plans to complete similar projects in Europe and South America by the end of 2005, Brewer said.
Brewer said the hardware consolidation involved moving ERP hardware from remote locations to Motorola's data center in Chicago to cut operational costs. The North American rollout has boosted performance on Oracle databases by 62%, mostly as a result of a reduction of data.
Outerbay's ADM software works with Oracle's purge functionality. But in Motorola's case, instead of purging data, it moves the information from Sun Microsystems Inc. UltraSparc II E10K machines to EMC Symmetrix arrays.
Before the ILM software rollout, Motorola had projected that data growth over the next six years in its Personal Communication Sector would rise to 23TB. With the new software in place, it's expected to grow only to 10TB.
In all, Motorola plans on reducing the size of its databases worldwide by 44% once the software is rolled out across all divisions.

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