How it works
RainStor enables simple and cost-effective management of enterprise Big Data. RainStor can be deployed as a primary or secondary database depending on the use-case and end-user requirements. RainStor’s database is embedded in industry leading solutions delivered by strategic partners including Informatica, HP, Dell among others.
Historical data, such as inactive or static data from operational databases, data warehouses, or ever increasing volumes of machine-generated data need to be managed and stored for further query and analysis. Data growth rates in specific sectors outstrips that which has been generated by humans in transactional or operational systems. Machine or raw data coming from network logs, web clickstream logs and sensor or meter data from a utility smart-grid network, oil and gas pipelines or transportation and logistics carriers is coming into the enterprise at network speed and must be collected, managed and analyzed.
The data must be online and accessible for a number of business and compliance regulatory purposes and when it is voluminous, it becomes cost-prohibitive to manage over time. Traditional offline tape archives don’t provide significant cost benefits when compared to modern solutions that enable you to keep data online and fully accessible over multi year timespans. Tape archives are risky and complexwhen it comes to reinstatement and the associated challenges with mapping older schemas with their corresponding database and application versions.
RainStor provides unique database capabilities which directly address the need to store large volumes of data at very low cost and those differentiating capabilities include:
Data is ingested in a number of different formats from production database source data, network logs captured from a network or flat files (CSV, BCP format). RainStor can easily scale to ingest extreme volumes at high rates.
By only storing the unique field and pattern values contained within each imported record, RainStor de-duplicates the data, resulting in extreme compression – up to 40X compared to raw data.
RainStor’s auto-expiry of data from the repository is based on configurable retention policies that also support legal hold.
The data in RainStor, while highly compressed, remains directly accessible using standard SQL, a number of popular BI tools and MapReduce on Hadoop. The data requires no re-inflation to run the analysis and results are returned consistently at high performance.
RainStor does not require any specialist DBA skills to install and maintain and with no special tuning or indexes, requires low to zero maintenance over time.
As data volumes grow, the underlying hardware and storage platforms can be easily extended to meet additional demand.
