Structured data management with

HPE 3PAR File Persona and

HPE Structured Data Manager

Contents
Executive summary ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 2
Audience ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 2
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 2
HPE 3PAR File Persona ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 2
HPE Structured Data Manager .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 2
Technology overview .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................3
Designer .......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................3
Web Console ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 4
Solution components............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 4
Recommendations ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 5
Benefits............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 6
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 6

Technical white paper

Technical white paper Page 2

Executive summary
This document describes structured data management, which combines HPE 3PAR File Persona and HPE Structured Data Manager to automate
the process of extracting inactive structured data to archive on file shares. The solution also focuses on optimizing data in production databases
by validating and deleting structured data on block volumes to improve visibility, performance, and service levels.

Audience
The descriptions and recommendations in this document are intended to help you and your HPE sales representatives to understand the
features and components of this solution.

Introduction
HPE 3PAR File Persona
HPE 3PAR StoreServ with HPE 3PAR File Persona offers a unique and efficient storage solution that incorporates multiprotocol support into the
system architecture. It delivers a tightly integrated, truly converged solution for provisioning both block storage volumes and file shares from a
single storage system.

HPE 3PAR File Persona Software Suite is a licensed feature of the HPE 3PAR Operating System enabling a rich set of file protocols, an Object
Access API (REST), and file data services. HPE 3PAR File Persona delivers Network File System (NFS), Server Message Block (SMB), and object
access on HPE 3PAR StoreServ platforms. This boosts storage utilization and lowers costs by moving storage-affinity–related workloads such as
data access, protection, and analytics directly into the storage operating system and controller. All block, file, and object access are managed via
the HPE 3PAR StoreServ Management Console, which enables simple provisioning and features a search-enabled interface aligned with
HPE OneView.

The HPE 3PAR File Persona Software Suite solution extends the spectrum of primary storage workloads natively addressed by the system’s
default Block Persona. The Block Persona is ideal for your virtualization, database, and application workloads with File Persona enabling home
directory consolidation, group or departmental shares, corporate shares, and custom cloud applications—all from truly Converged Controllers,
truly agile capacity, and truly unified management. The HPE 3PAR StoreServ File Persona Suite is your key to unlocking this capability within any
HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage system with Converged Controllers.

Only HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage has the ability to host workload-centric storage personas directly on a multicontroller architecture with
hardware-accelerated data compaction—delivering a high-performance, low-cost, tier-1 storage platform to address any application need and
data type. Protecting your file data and organization, as well as increasing your uptime have never been simpler thanks to high availability (HA)
and resiliency features built into HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage.

HPE Structured Data Manager

Databases that have been in service for long periods of time, particularly those running large business-critical applications such as ERP,
accumulate large amounts of data. Some portion of this data is typically inactive and this less frequently accessed data can be more efficiently
stored in a less expensive location outside of the active database.

In addition to being cost ineffective, allowing very old records to accumulate in your active database slows performance and leads to the need for
additional, expensive hardware. A good solution to this problem is moving the inactive data out of your active database and into an archive data
store while maintaining application integrity. Thus, you balance the need for long-term records retention with optimal database performance.

HPE Structured Data Manager provides powerful tools for designing a database archive solution. In many cases, older applications are kept
online purely for data access purposes in case of an emergency, such as a lawsuit or an audit of some kind.

Corporate governance rules may require you to maintain the data in some accessible form. Placing the data from the retiring application into a
structured file is an excellent way to preserve the data in a usable form while getting rid of the obsolete application and database. Once the data
is archived in this way, the application can be retired and the resources repurposed for newer applications. While archived data may be accessed
infrequently, it must remain accessible for critical situations, such as legal hold and eDiscovery.

HPE Structured Data Manager provides two major types of archive data stores—database and file. You can use these two types independently
or in combination.
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Database-to-database archives data (copies and purges) from an active database to an archive database, which is typically located on a less
expensive platform. This type of data movement provides transparent access, in the sense that users access the data as if it were still in the
active database using the same application program and protocols. Database-to-database works best for situations in which you must free space
in your active database for performance while still maintaining easy access to the data.

In a multi-tiered configuration, you can store some archived data in another database (second tier) while the rest is stored in files (third tier). The
second tier gives users ready access to data while improving the performance of the active database. As the need to access the second tier data
diminishes, you then may wish to migrate that data to the third tier.

Database-to-file moves can either archive data (copy and purge), or simply copy the data from the active database to an archive file store.
This is most useful for application retirement. The data is stored in a structured file, such as XML, CSV, or JSON formats. Application integrity
is maintained during the move. The file data can be accessed using standard methods instead of relying on an application that may become
obsolete.

For example, suppose that the data must be kept for 10 years and if you need to access the data 10 years after it was archived, the tools and
applications that were originally operated by it might be long since obsolete and unavailable. XML and CSV storage provide self-contained,
independently accessible formats that are supported over long spans of time. HPE 3PAR File Persona, with its rich set of data features, provides
the benefits of reclaiming disk space and simplifying file management by providing a secure, highly available location where files may be
archived.

HPE Structured Data Manager makes your archived data accessible in a variety of ways to meet the needs of your users.
• Maintain transparent access to the data—HPE Structured Data Manager supports archiving data into a different database location. To the
user, it appears as though the application data were still in the active database. This approach gives users immediate and indistinguishable
access to the archive data.
• Access XML data through the Archive Query Server (AQS)—HPE Structured Data Manager provides the AQS tool for
application-independent access to archive data. This type of access is best suited for data archived for long-term retention where
the original application may have been retired or is otherwise unavailable.
• Reload data from the archive data store to the active database—HPE Structured Data Manager supports restoring the archived data to
the active database. Users will then be able to access the data and perform transactions on it.
• Upload data from the archive data store to another database—HPE Structured Data Manager allows you to upload the archive data to a
completely different database location. This feature is useful for heterogeneous databases. For example, you may have archived from an
SQL Server database but need to restore that data to an Oracle database.

Technology overview
HPE Structured Data Manager provides two primary tools—Designer, to assist you with selecting the appropriate content for archive; and Web
Console, for managing the execution of the archive process.

Designer
HPE Structured Data Manager Designer uses models, parameters, cartridges, and business flows to specify which data to move, where to move,
how to move, and what additional logic applies to the data movement.

The model graphically represents the database tables and views. It also shows how they are linked together through relationships. Tables in the
model may be of the following types:
• Driving table—the root of the model hierarchy that drives the selection of the transactions. A driving table may have zero to many children,
which are related to the parent by foreign keys or a conditional relationship. The selections from the driving table are propagated to the other
tables impacting their row selections.
• Lookup table—a table that contains helpful non-transaction, reference-only information. These tables help with defining values, which are
used in rules to select the data to be archived as well as to ensure that the archived data is more complete. The data in lookup tables is not
purged from the source database, as the active tables and the archived tables need it.
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• Transactional table—a table that contains information about the business transactions. Transactional tables are always part of the archive.
• Chaining table—a lower level table in a many-to-one or many-to-many relationship.

Parameters provide values within your project. These may be run-time parameters, configuration parameters, or dynamic parameters. The user,
when running the archive job, sets run-time parameters. These parameters change each time the job is run, for example, if your archive is based
on a specified cutoff date, this value may change every time you run the job. These values may be “where” clauses in your model rules.
Configuration parameters are set only by the administrator and are changed infrequently, perhaps at deployment time. Specifying if the archive
format is to be CSV or XML, or specifying GZIP compression are configuration parameters. Dynamic parameters have their values computed by
execution scripts at run time, for example, the type or version of the database or application.

Once the model and rules are completed, you create a cartridge to specify how to apply them. A cartridge specifies that the archive is to be
database-to-file or database-to-database. A cartridge can specify characteristics of the project, such as which selected data is to be copied only,
or copied and purged, and perhaps which columns to include or exclude in the archive. A cartridge may also be defined to reload data from your
archive database back to the active database. A special type of cartridge called a data access cartridge may be created, which will allow users to
access the archived data through their Web browser.

A cartridge can be deployed by itself or as part of a business flow. The business flow performs additional processing, a series of activities to
perform in sequence. Business flows allow you to insert your own scripts between activities. A business flow may include one or more cartridges.
For example, you may have two models each representing a different business function. At the end of the quarter, you want to run one business
flow, which archives the data represented by both models to a file archive.

Web Console
The Web Console manages the metadata required to perform and monitor operations on the active and archive databases. This metadata is
referred to as the HPE Structured Data Manager repository. The repository includes a named deployment environment that is associated with a
source (active) database.

Business flows are deployed from Designer into a specific environment. Users with the necessary privileges can run these deployed business
flows against the source database. The repository may specify multiple deployment environments, thus supporting multiple source and target
databases from a single installation of HPE Structured Data Manager.

Designer and run-time environments can be installed either on the same machine or on hosts remote from each other. The hosts may or may not
be accessible over the network. In the first case, HPE Structured Data Manager generates the deployment files locally and moves the files to the
remote system, where they can be deployed in the chosen environment. In the second case, the deployed files must be handed off to someone
with access to the remote system.

HPE Structured Data Manager maintains a run-time history of the business flows deployed across multiple deployments. This history is useful for
viewing status information for previous executions of the business flow.

Solution components
HPE Structured Data Manager comes with a sample transactional database and scripts for installing the database into the following
environments:
• Oracle
• SQL Server
• Sybase
• DB2
• PostgreSQL
A tutorial is included with HPE Structured Data Manager, which guides you through the following:
• Creating a model of the database including parameters and rules
• Creating a cartridge of this model to archive data
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• Creating a data access cartridge to view the archived data

• Creating a business flow to archive the database and a business flow to undo the archive
• Creating the repository and the deployment environment
• Deployment of the business flow
• Executing the job and monitoring the status
The tutorial also shows you how to examine the archived data using HPE AQS to access data via Microsoft® Excel or through deployment of the
defined data access cartridge.
This sample database and deployment is used to test database-to-file archive, with the archived data being stored on an SMB/CIFS share
provided to the host server from HPE 3PAR File Persona. All HPE Structured Data Manager components were installed on a single
Windows Server® 2012 R2 running SQL Server 2012. Figure 1 illustrates HPE Structured Data Manager’s conceptual architecture with HPE 3PAR
File Persona.

Figure 1. HPE Structured Data Manager architecture

Data was successfully archived from the active database to the HPE 3PAR File Persona SMB/CIFS share. Tests included archiving data in all
three formats, each being archived to a different directory within the HPE 3PAR File Persona SMB/CIFS share. Archived data was verified through
Excel as well as through the data access cartridge. The undo business flow was tested to verify reading archived data from the HPE 3PAR File
Persona share.

Recommendations
• Engage HPE Professional Services to help with the planning, installation, setup, and configuration of HPE Structured Data Manager in
your environment.
• HPE Structured Data Manager places no restrictions on the model of HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage platform that may be used. Choose the
model that matches your needs for performance, capacity, and potential growth.
• Follow the guidelines in the HPE 3PAR File Persona Software Suite technical overview document and the HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage best
practices guide (see Useful links) for configuration and setup of HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage and HPE 3PAR File Persona Software.
Technical white paper

Benefits
HPE Structured Data Manager and HPE 3PAR File Persona increase the efficiencies of the data center and productivity of the organization
intelligently. They provide the following benefits:
• Ensure protection of intellectual property—retain information from retired applications and production databases securely, while ensuring
the integrity of production and archive data at all times through Active Directory user authentication and authorization.
• Legacy data clean up—remove older, inactive data from a production database to reduce data footprint and storage costs including
hardware, maintenance, and administration.
• Improve efficiency—with production databases on tier-1 high-performance block volumes and inactive structured data on file, which focuses
on retention with rapid online access to data. You can also retire legacy applications without losing associated data or risking noncompliance
with corporate and regulatory policies.
• Compliance and governance—enables management and control of valuable business information in accordance with corporate policy and
regulatory requirements throughout the information lifecycle.

Conclusion
With the unprecedented growth in data volumes and formats, it is getting more difficult to find the information you need, maintain customer
service levels, control costs, and support long-term retention and access requirements. HPE Structured Data Manager is a part of the
Hewlett Packard Enterprise comprehensive portfolio of information management solutions. HPE 3PAR File Persona provides the benefits of
reclaiming disk space and simplifying file management by providing a secure, highly available location where files are archived. This unique
software-hardware solution intelligently identifies and manages your database content to ensure critical business information is retained,
secured, and accessible. This solution delivers superior business insight and value with lower total cost of ownership.
Useful links
HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage
HPE 3PAR File Persona

Technical overview of HPE 3PAR File Persona Software Suite

HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage best practices guide

HPE Structured Data Manager

Learn more at
hpe.com/storage/3PAR

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4AA6-4053ENW, February 2016