Volt Information Sciences controls data growth to improve PeopleSoft Enterprise performance and reduce storage costs.

Why IBM?

IBM® Optim™ provides comprehensive archive, browse and restore capabilities that are fully integrated with PeopleSoft Enterprise. Predefined archive templates are easy to customize. Archives can be managed in an archive database as well as using alternative storage options.


Growing PeopleSoft Enterprise databases increase costs
With over 300 offices worldwide, Volt Information Sciences is a leading provider of IT staffing services, telecommunications services and computer systems for the Fortune 500. Volt relies on its PeopleSoft Enterprise Financials and Human Capital Management applications to manage billing, receivables, payables, general ledger, asset management and payroll processing. The Financials application database had grown to 500 GB and was expanding at a rate of 6 percent per month. The company projected that continuing to support this database growth would require an additional investment of 3.5 usable terabytes of disk capacity, an expense of well over $350,000 in hardware alone.

“Continually striving to maximize the performance of our database, we were coming up against a wall. Even with extensive database tuning and the addition of hardware, application performance was reaching its physical limits,” said Cliff Rizzo, Volt’s Vice President of Corporate MIS.

Additionally, Volt was preparing to upgrade its PeopleSoft Enterprise Financials application to version 8.4. Given the size of the Financials database, they estimated that the upgrade would take over 140 consecutive hours, requiring the company to shut down its system and cease billing operations for nearly a week — which simply was not an option.

“We issue over 40,000 paychecks per week and process countless customer bills. Any delay on these business-critical operations has a direct impact on our bottom line,” said Dan Hallihan, Vice President-Accounting Operations at Volt. “We knew we couldn’t afford the upgrade to run longer than 50 hours for HR and 70 hours for Financials, and we needed to find a solution that could help us meet this requirement.”

Build or buy archiving decision
Volt maintained four years of financial data in its PeopleSoft Enterprise database. Degrading performance coupled with the projected strain on application upgrade time led Volt to conclude that it needed a more cost-effective approach for managing and maintaining historical Financials data.

Initially, Volt assessed the option of building a custom archiving solution using PeopleSoft-supplied tools. After estimating the time and cost involved, the company realized it would not be feasible. “Developing a solution internally would have cost us 9,600 hours of manpower and nearly half a million dollars, not to mention the risk that a custom solution would not work with future releases of the application,” said Hallihan. Volt realized that purchasing a database archiving solution from an established vendor would be the most cost-effective approach.

Key requirements for selecting a solution
Volt began investigating available database archiving solutions with the following key criteria:

• Integrate easily within the PeopleSoft Enterprise applications
• Deliver proven technology that is easy to install, implement and upgrade
• Provide comprehensive archive, browse and restore capabilities
• Provide predefined archive templates that are easy to customize
• Manage archived data in an archive database and offer alternative low-cost storage options
• Compress archived data to minimize storage requirements
• Provide access to archived data using standard PeopleSoft Query and reporting tools

Volt evaluated various vendor solutions using a Six Sigma approach. “We selected IBM® Optim™ for its ease of installation, flexible archive options and proven track record of success,” said Rizzo. “Just as important was the success with PeopleSoft customers and the Optim team’s extensive application knowledge.”

Optim allows authorized users to initiate and manage archiving and retrieval functions from within PeopleSoft pages/panels. Predefined archive templates support specific PeopleSoft Enterprise modules, and the Archive Template Designer™ makes it easy to customize business rules for database archiving.
Further, only Optim provided Volt with options for writing archived data to a flat file, an archive database, a reporting database or a variety of low-cost storage media.

Volt deployed the option that provides transparent access to archived data stored in an archive database with the capability to move archives to other storage media for long-term retention. Archived data remains accessible no matter where it is stored and, thanks to Optim’s flexible archive options and robust security functionality, archives cannot be overwritten, and even have data-level protection.

Implementation requires minimal effort
“We determined that we could archive and remove three years of data from the production database, store archived data on a more cost-effective storage medium, and keep the most current two years of data online in the production database for fast and easy access,” said Rizzo.

Because Optim is integrated with PeopleSoft applications, implementation required minimal effort. Volt’s environment consisted of an Oracle® database operating on HP-UX™. Volt worked closely with Beacon Application Services, a certified PeopleSoft integrator and implementation partner, to set up the solution.

With one database administrator and two Beacon professionals, Volt implemented database archiving for seven modules in seven weeks and archived 40 percent of the data from those modules, which included two custom-built modules. Optim was implemented and operating in mid-December, within 48 days of the signed contract.

“Everyone was well prepared and knocked down roadblocks quickly and professionally,” said Hallihan. “Based on the project progress reports I received from Cliff Rizzo, the predefined archive business object templates provided by Optim expedited the entire process.”

Archiving delivers performance gains
Initially, Volt archived and removed two years of historical data from the production environment to more cost-effective storage. All together, Volt has successfully lowered the total cost of ownership of its PeopleSoft Financials application by $350,000 in disk storage alone.

“Optim enabled us to safely archive 40 percent of our production data and improve overall application performance by more than 40 percent. Our time and labor processing experienced a 63 percent improvement, billing 57 percent and accounts receivable processing better than 50 percent,” commented Rizzo.

Upon completion of its archive project, Volt was able to reduce the projected time to upgrade to PeopleSoft version 8.4 to less than three days, meeting the company’s required window and ensuring no interruptions with billing operations.

In addition, the company saves an estimated four hours each week on backups and equivalent time on restore processing. Volt has also been able to reduce the cost of compliance with federal, state and local data regulations, such as Sarbanes–Oxley. Archiving maintains the referential integrity of historical data and saves archived data in an unalterable format that enables fast and easy access in the event of an audit.

“By averting the cost of development for an in-house solution, Optim has already paid for itself,” said Hallihan. “The comprehensiveness of the solution enabled a quick and easy implementation, and Volt is ready to deploy database archiving for additional PeopleSoft modules with the simple snap-in of additional archive templates. We will never again lose sleep over a major PeopleSoft upgrade thanks to Optim.”

About IBM Optim
IBM® Optim™ enterprise data management solutions focus on critical business issues, such as data growth management, data privacy compliance, test data management, e-discovery, application upgrades, migrations and retirements. Optim aligns application data management with business objectives to help optimize performance, mitigate risk and control costs, while delivering capabilities that scale across enterprise applications, databases and platforms. Today, Optim helps companies across industries worldwide capitalize on the business value of their enterprise applications and databases, with the power to manage enterprise application data through every stage of its lifecycle.

For more information
To learn more about IBM Optim enterprise data management solutions, contact your IBM sales representative or visit: www.optimsolution.com.