Smart Associates’ New Products Increase IBM Netezza Data Warehouse Return on Investment
Smart Associates' new products offer more options for firms to increase ROI from their IBM Netezza data warehouse investments. Netezza tech continues to provide huge value to many large firms dependent on first class business analytics. These are large investments, but through years of helping its customers to manage these systems, Smart Associates has found there are additional benefits to be realised at a relatively modest cost, such as higher availability and improved performance.
London, United Kingdom, January 13, 2022 --(PR.com)-- Smart Associates is pleased to announce three new products from its Smart Management Framework for IBM Netezza data warehouses. This provides customers with more flexibility when assessing options for improving ROI from their IBM Netezza investments.
Netezza technology, whether as IBM Netezza Performance Server or IBM PureData System for Analytics, continues to provide huge value to many large organisations dependent on first class business analytics capabilities. These are large investments, but through many years of helping its customers to manage these systems, Smart Associates has found that there are a number of additional ROI benefits which can be realised at a relatively modest cost.
Three areas of ROI opportunity
There are three key areas of opportunity to improve the management of Netezza systems which are addressed by the three new products from Smart Associates:
Database replication. For many businesses, their large scale analytics systems have become mission critical. Some have identified that, in the event of a disaster, it is vital that they can recover quickly and easily to a backup Netezza data warehouse in a different location. However the usual methods of database replication to create and maintain the backup are slow, with restore times of many hours or even days. A long Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) can be extremely costly in time lost to the business, perhaps millions of dollars.
SmartSafe is Database Replication as a Service (DbRaaS) from Smart Associates which allows customers to replicate their Netezza databases in near real-time. They choose how frequently to replicate changes between systems, according to workload, data volatility, bandwidth, and recovery time/point considerations. In the event of a disaster, Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) can be measured in the minutes it will take SmartSafe to make a backup system the new primary, and for DNS servers to be re-pointed to this. The second key metric for database restore, Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – essentially a measure of the maximum acceptable loss of data following restore – can also be minimised.
Performance benefits
Even without a disaster, SmartSafe database replication also provides a huge benefit by enabling customers to divide their data, users, and workloads between multiple appliances to multiply performance, concurrency and throughput.
Helping migration to the Cloud
SmartSafe is also valuable for those upgrading their existing Netezza appliances to IBM NPS for Cloud Pak for Data. The migration process is substantial and not without risk and the recommended approach is to engage professional services to undertake this task. SmartSafe allows you to undertake a virtually risk-free migration to your new platform as part of the service. In a nutshell, you run your old and new Netezza systems in parallel, replicating the databases.
Automated LDAP Synchronisation. Organisations that use LDAP authentication (such as with Active Directory) with their Netezza systems are well aware of how much effort goes into keeping database permissions aligned to their corporate security policy. This synchronisation is a manual process which as well as being error-prone and a burden to DBAs, leaves an exposure to risk of data breaches.
SmartSecure provides dynamic creation or dropping of database users and groups based on synchronised Active Directory / LDAP master data, and the automatic addition removal or addition of users from or to groups as well as granting or revoking permissions to or from groups. SmartSecure removes a risk of user error or compromised credentials that could lead to a data breach.
Automation of housekeeping functions. While IBM®’s Pure Data™ for Analytics / Netezza Performance Server systems are highly fault tolerant and require less effort to administer than traditional RDBMS, problems can still occur at any time. Yet it is not cost effective to dedicate skilled resources in the event of such rare occurrences.
SmartSure automates many housekeeping tasks to help keep Netezza systems operating at peak performance with minimal manual intervention.
About Smart Associates
Formed in 2003, Smart Associates has gained a reputation for deep expertise in the provision and management of data warehouses, both on-premise and in the Cloud. The company expanded from its inception as a purely time and materials style consultancy into combining its products and outsourced services into fixed price solution delivery.
The approach we have taken is to capture accumulated experience into our Smart Management Frameworks and Smart Data Frameworks. This means we can automate many migration and management processes, including many items not covered by standard vendor tools. The result is to ensure critical tasks are completed correctly, and risk, time and costs are greatly reduced.
Our customers are large, "blue chip" corporations in retail, insurance, banking, financial services, telecoms, healthcare and other industries, and located all around the globe.
More Information
Smart Associates: https://smart-associates.biz
SmartSafe: https://smart-associates.biz/solutions/SmartSafe.php
SmartSecure: https://smart-associates.biz/solutions/SmartSecure.php
SmartSure: https://smart-associates.biz/solutions/SmartSure.php
Netezza technology, whether as IBM Netezza Performance Server or IBM PureData System for Analytics, continues to provide huge value to many large organisations dependent on first class business analytics capabilities. These are large investments, but through many years of helping its customers to manage these systems, Smart Associates has found that there are a number of additional ROI benefits which can be realised at a relatively modest cost.
Three areas of ROI opportunity
There are three key areas of opportunity to improve the management of Netezza systems which are addressed by the three new products from Smart Associates:
Database replication. For many businesses, their large scale analytics systems have become mission critical. Some have identified that, in the event of a disaster, it is vital that they can recover quickly and easily to a backup Netezza data warehouse in a different location. However the usual methods of database replication to create and maintain the backup are slow, with restore times of many hours or even days. A long Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) can be extremely costly in time lost to the business, perhaps millions of dollars.
SmartSafe is Database Replication as a Service (DbRaaS) from Smart Associates which allows customers to replicate their Netezza databases in near real-time. They choose how frequently to replicate changes between systems, according to workload, data volatility, bandwidth, and recovery time/point considerations. In the event of a disaster, Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) can be measured in the minutes it will take SmartSafe to make a backup system the new primary, and for DNS servers to be re-pointed to this. The second key metric for database restore, Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – essentially a measure of the maximum acceptable loss of data following restore – can also be minimised.
Performance benefits
Even without a disaster, SmartSafe database replication also provides a huge benefit by enabling customers to divide their data, users, and workloads between multiple appliances to multiply performance, concurrency and throughput.
Helping migration to the Cloud
SmartSafe is also valuable for those upgrading their existing Netezza appliances to IBM NPS for Cloud Pak for Data. The migration process is substantial and not without risk and the recommended approach is to engage professional services to undertake this task. SmartSafe allows you to undertake a virtually risk-free migration to your new platform as part of the service. In a nutshell, you run your old and new Netezza systems in parallel, replicating the databases.
Automated LDAP Synchronisation. Organisations that use LDAP authentication (such as with Active Directory) with their Netezza systems are well aware of how much effort goes into keeping database permissions aligned to their corporate security policy. This synchronisation is a manual process which as well as being error-prone and a burden to DBAs, leaves an exposure to risk of data breaches.
SmartSecure provides dynamic creation or dropping of database users and groups based on synchronised Active Directory / LDAP master data, and the automatic addition removal or addition of users from or to groups as well as granting or revoking permissions to or from groups. SmartSecure removes a risk of user error or compromised credentials that could lead to a data breach.
Automation of housekeeping functions. While IBM®’s Pure Data™ for Analytics / Netezza Performance Server systems are highly fault tolerant and require less effort to administer than traditional RDBMS, problems can still occur at any time. Yet it is not cost effective to dedicate skilled resources in the event of such rare occurrences.
SmartSure automates many housekeeping tasks to help keep Netezza systems operating at peak performance with minimal manual intervention.
About Smart Associates
Formed in 2003, Smart Associates has gained a reputation for deep expertise in the provision and management of data warehouses, both on-premise and in the Cloud. The company expanded from its inception as a purely time and materials style consultancy into combining its products and outsourced services into fixed price solution delivery.
The approach we have taken is to capture accumulated experience into our Smart Management Frameworks and Smart Data Frameworks. This means we can automate many migration and management processes, including many items not covered by standard vendor tools. The result is to ensure critical tasks are completed correctly, and risk, time and costs are greatly reduced.
Our customers are large, "blue chip" corporations in retail, insurance, banking, financial services, telecoms, healthcare and other industries, and located all around the globe.
More Information
Smart Associates: https://smart-associates.biz
SmartSafe: https://smart-associates.biz/solutions/SmartSafe.php
SmartSecure: https://smart-associates.biz/solutions/SmartSecure.php
SmartSure: https://smart-associates.biz/solutions/SmartSure.php
Contact
Smart Associates
Bill Porter
+44 7782 167831
smart-associates.biz
Bill Porter
+44 7782 167831
smart-associates.biz
Contact
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