Contemplating IT

Retiring applications is something that I must confess I haven't thought much about. However, I recently met with the Sai Gundavelli -CEO of an emerging vendor called Solix and he shared with me their new product called ExAPPS. Solix has been selling its data archiving appliance and in the course of doing so recognized the value of providing a solution for application retirement.

A brief description of the Solix ExApps appliance. First, this solution is designed for data base applications. It is an appliance that provides the software and storage for access and retention of the data from the retired application. In other words - you will move the data from the retired app off of your primary storage system to the ExAPPS appliance. And since the application is retired you will also access the data via the ExAPPS appliance as well as a gateway.

The things that I think are valuable and compelling about ExAPPS:

1. It is application-aware and supports ODBC and SQL92. You can retire your applications but still read all of the data, run reports and queries.

2. It re-organizes the database format and reduces the storage capacity requirements - according to Solix - by 90%. This significantly reduces your capacity costs, floor space, power consumption and cooling requirements. Remember that the application is being retired and the data is fundamentally being stored as an active archive. "Compressing" it - or more accurately - reformatting the data so that it is capacity optimized is the smart and practical thing to do. Will it perform as well? Probably not - but not because of the reformatting but because it isn't being run on big servers or big storage any more. But who cares? It's retired!

3. Since ExAPPS is actually reformatting the structure of the database it doesn't require any "rehydration" of the data. This means that even if you have to fire up the data and access it - the entire process requires no additional capacity or processing cycles as a result of a rehydration process.

It is also important to note that retiring applications is typically not taken care of by an appliance alone but requires planning and services. These projects can take months to accomplish effectively. So Solix and probably over time their channel partners will work with you on this process as well as provide the appliance.

ExAPPS is an interesting solution. Solix has taken what they've learned with database archiving and developed a solution specific to database application retirement. They were able to use a good portion of their current technology and add some additional functionality - in effect creating a blue ocean market for themselves leveraging their unique application retirement appliance.

I haven't spoken to any of their customers yet. Solix claims to have a handful of early installations with some big companies. And I intend to talk to more customers in general about the challenges with application retirement and how big of a priority this is for their respective companies. Application retirement appliances could be a new segment and other archiving companies may follow Solix's lead. It could be very interesting to see how this evolves. The IT world is getting "old" and we really do need to start thinking about application retirement as a priority.