White Papers: master data management

This IDG white paper explores specific backup and availability challenges organisations must surmount as they move to virtualise their business-critical applications. It then shows how attaining proper service levels for these applications requires a high degree of visibility into the VMware virtual environment.

There is a definite need for better data backup solutions in today’s enterprise data centers. The question is whether to continue with software-only backup and deduplication solutions, or to make the move to a purpose-built backup appliance with deduplication capabilities. This paper provides a structured approach to assessing the advantages of the appliance model. Read this whitepaper.

Increasingly companies are recognizing the value of an enterprise data warehouse (EDW). A true EDW provides a single 360-degree view of the business and a powerful platform for a wide spectrum of business intelligence tasks ranging from predictive analysis to near real-time strategic and tactical decision support throughout the organization. Ensuring the EDW will get the desired performance and will scale out as your data grows you need to get three fundamental things correct, the hardware configuration, the physical data model and the data loading process. Read on.

Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) allows Oracle Database to run any packaged or custom application, unchanged across a set of clustered servers. This provides the highest levels of availability and the most flexible scalability. If a clustered server fails, Oracle continues running on the remaining servers. When you need more processing power, simply add another server without taking users offline. To keep costs low, even the highest-end systems can be built out of standardized, commodity parts. Read on.

The impact on the business from data losses can be deep, and it can be far-ranging in terms of damaged reputation and reduced customer loyalty. In a recent study, more than half of the surveyed large companies have had to terminate employees or contractors for internal security violations. The solution to such challenges, then, is to safeguard data where it lives—in the database. Indeed, database security is rapidly becoming a recognized best practice—but often, companies lag behind in this area. Read on.