Interim Copies and Their Effect on Your Organization

When moving databases from one system to another, often temporary copies of the unloaded data are created. These copies are called interim copies. Even though these copies are temporary, they can influence the speed and functionality of your overall systems and affect the job functions of some members of your IT team.

Who Do Interim Copies Affect?

The three main job functions affected by are all located in the IT Department and they are:
• The Storage Architect who’s responsible for understanding how IT operations impact storage requirements.
• The Application Architect who is responsible for the overall availability and performance of the end user application.
• The Capacity Planner who is responsible for determining the IT system capacity needed to support current and forecasted workloads that run on the mainframe and open systems servers.

How Do Interim Copies Affect Your Systems?

There are 3 main ways they can affect your systems. They are listed below in order of importance:

1. Creating interim copies requires extra processing steps which takes time. In an age where people expect real-time answers and information, reducing the elapsed time of a unit of work is crucial to providing a real-time response to user requests of all types from any device. Or simply, reducing the time to accomplish a task means a shorter response time from a user’s perspective.

2. They can raise your MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second) consumption, which will raise your overall operating costs. Consider this – the average cost per MIPS annually is $4,500. So, if interim copies are consuming an additional 100 MIPS daily, it could cost you an additional $450,000 annually.

3. When interim copies are created they need to be stored. This means you will need extra storage space on a disc drive, which again will raise your overall operating costs.

Addressing the 3 points above will greatly reduce costs and the time your organization is wasting dealing with interim copies. Alebra’s unique solutions can lower operating overhead and enhance enterprise data integration with an extremely fast transport.