SAND Technology today announced next-generation advances in its SAND Dynamic Nearline Architecture (SAND/DNA) product suite. SAND/DNA's advanced information management technology now works seamlessly to manage extensive data stores, providing fast access to and highly efficient utilization of data in enterprise environments and large data warehouses. This tight integration of SAND's core products allows for easy, user-friendly implementation of a "data-on-demand" service.

SAND/DNA enables enterprise customers in industries such as healthcare, government, financial services, retail, and global transportation to cost-effectively retain massive amounts of compressed data in a nearline repository for extended periods, in accordance with any applicable business rules and regulatory requirements, and to rapidly retrieve information when needed. A centralized data management solution with unparalleled performance and storage efficiency, the SAND/DNA suite dramatically reduces costs and management complexity while ensuring continuous data availability.

SAND/DNA's advanced information management technology compresses data to typically 10 percent of its original size, while giving users the ability to query any attributes of the data without decompressing it first. This next-generation capability is ideal for satisfying enterprise compliance requirements as well as for leveraging valuable information in data warehouses.

"The explosive growth in the size and quantity of databases is a well-known phenomenon in virtually every vertical industry," said Joshua Greenbaum, principal of Enterprise Applications Consulting (EAC). "Making intelligent use of this data is now seen as a major part of companies' efforts to improve their operational efficiency; to better serve customers and partners; to develop, market and sell better products; and to stay on top of their regulatory and compliance requirements. SAND Technology's SAND/DNA reveals a unique and creative way to solve the problems endemic to data warehouse archiving."

A high-performance data management platform for building complex multi-user analytic applications, SAND/DNA Analytics™ is unique among analytic data repositories in that it doesn't require indexing or specialized schemas. All the data, down to the most detailed level, is available for querying immediately after it is loaded, permitting quick and easy access by business users employing industry-standard business intelligence tools or methods.

Because SAND/DNA Analytics does not depend on indexing, it is faster to prototype and set up, more responsive to changing business requirements, and quicker to respond to complex user queries. As a result, SAND/DNA Analytics can serve as a rapid development environment that promotes end-user involvement in data warehouse design, reducing the time and costs involved in any business intelligence deployment project. It can host complex analytic applications that would tax the performance of traditional data warehouses, and because it's highly scalable, it can even serve as an intelligent application warehouse in its own right.

SAND/DNA Analytics requires minimal IT resources to implement and maintain. It runs on standard hardware, makes very efficient use of processing resources, and can store terabytes of data in a footprint that is typically 30 percent or less the size of an indexed relational warehouse.

Compatible with most popular hardware and software environments, SAND/DNA Analytics brings an unprecedented degree of performance and flexibility to existing data warehouse systems and enterprise data stores.

SAND/DNA Access allows organizations to effectively balance impressive storage economy with high levels of data availability. Its unique, highly compressed storage format typically occupies 5-10 percent of the space required by a traditional indexed data warehouse while allowing business users to access the data directly using standard SQL-based tools and methods.

SAND/DNA Access can work with any structured data sourced from any operational system or data warehouse. It stores a read-only copy that can serve as an auditable record of the data as it stood when it was loaded into the nearline repository. Users can search this nearline data using standard business intelligence tools, without having to decompress it first. Selected data can be extracted, decompressed, and loaded into SAND/DNA Analytics or any database or data store for further analysis.

Compatible with most popular hardware and software environments, SAND/DNA Access brings highly economical and accessible nearline storage to existing data warehouse systems.