Executive Summary
As your BW data grows in size, maintaining system performance and response times will prove costly and challenging if you want to keep all this data online.
On the other hand, users still want to access historical data.
As part of their Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) for SAP BW, many customers choose to keep data online going back a number of years. Data created prior to that can be kept Near Line or Offline so it can still be easily accessed by the users if needed.
As of SAP BW 7.01, you can use the CertoStore Storage System to offload your historical BW data as part of your Data Retention Strategy.
Overview of the functionality
You can set up a Data Archiving Process for Cubes as well as for DataStore Objects.
In the Selection Profile tab, you select your Characteristic for Time Slice.
Once the Data Archiving Process is set up, a new Archiving tab becomes available in the InfoProvider Administration menu (right click – manage).
Your relevant Cube data will need to be compressed before it can be archived. This is standard SAP BW functionality which can be managed under the Collapse tab.
SAP has built in a Process Flow Control with various stages which need to be confirmed either manually or as part of a Schedule.
A successfully processed Archiving Request will set a lock on the Characteristic Value for the Time Slice set in the previous step. This will prevent any new data being loaded against the already Archived data in the same Time Slice.
Once the data is ‘Archived’ on CertoStore, it can still be accessed by BW Queries as long as you set the ‘Read Near-Line Storage As Well’ flag in transaction RSRT properties for the relevant Queries.
Effectively the ‘Near-Line’ data is stored in a file on the CertoStore Server.
The Offline version is securely stored on the MatrixStore Nodes and can be retrieved again at any time if and when needed via the Archiving Object Management Tab.
Performance tests have shown that the BW Query response time (with Cache set to Inactive) is almost instantaneous for highly Aggregated Archived BW data.
A test with 7 million Archived line items (no-aggregation) returned the query data in a couple of minutes. This is the response time we can expect for this kind of volume.
Restoring the Archived data from the CertoStore Storage System and reloading it in the original Data Target requires a few extra steps and works perfectly.
Conclusion
CertoStore enables the full BW Information Lifecycle Management Spectrum including Near Line Storage using ADK. This will work on any database, including SAP HANA. Using CertoStore will reduce your Total Cost of Ownership and will increase overall system performance without losing access to your data.
