Cleaning up Databases to Save Time… and Money

Before a global consulting firm integrated new software into its

5-terabyte database, the company’s IT staff spent so much time cleaning

up their information that bigger projects had to take a back seat.

IT workers at Hewitt Associates, a human resources consulting and

outsourcing company based in Lincolnshire, Il., had gotten used to

spending many tedious hours searching through their IBM Lotus Domino

servers and racking through confusing Domino logs to determine which

applications weren’t being used, costing the company lots of hard drive

space and money.

To solve this problem they recently started using DYS Analytics’ Control

Usage Investigator (CUI) software.

Now, Hewitt’s IT staff can work on other projects while the CUI program

cleans up their servers, says Scott Pitts, manager of Hewitt’s Knowledge

Management Infrastructure Group.

”(CUI) is saving us money,” says Pitts. ”We don’t need people to

baby-sit the servers anymore.”

The CUI program is DYS’ answer to an IT need to make messaging and

collaboration applications run more efficiently, says Drew Wolff, vice

president of products at DYS. He says CUI software monitors and analyzes

application usage, and traffic and performance levels throughout entire

networks, allowing organizations to determine which applications were

being used and which ones were simply wasting time and money.

Prior to adopting the CUI software, Pitts says his IT staff had to look

through Domino logs to figure out which applications and user ID’s were

no longer needed. This process was time consuming and expensive, he adds.

”It was too much to check through by hand,” says Pitts. ”The Domino

logs were hard to understand. We were not doing it efficiently.”

Matt Cain, a Domino analyst at META Group, Inc., a Stamford, Conn.-based

analyst and research firm, says the CUI software solves a business

problem created by the excessive amounts of unused Lotus Notes

applications running on Domino systems.

”A tech-savvy business person can write his own Domino applications

easily, which ends up with lots of applications going unused,” says

Cain. ”Some companies have thousands of Lotus applications with 20 to 30

percent not being used, just taking up space. This creates a liability on

the system.”

CUI spots these unused applications and cleans up systems, Cain explains.
And Pitt adds that by eliminating such idle applications, the IT staff at

Hewitt was able to free up a lot of hard disc space.

”We aren’t spending money on adding new disc space to the servers

because of databases that aren’t being used,” says Pitt.

The CUI software also allows Hewitt IT staff to work on other important

projects, instead of manually searching through the servers for these

unnecessary applications.

”We used to have to do about 20 percent of this work by hand,” says

Pitts. ”If there were less than five people using a database, it was

hard to tell that when reading a log.”

DYS’ CUI is designed to solve such problems.

The Wellesley, Mass.-based provider of application performance software

released the CUI product as part of its CONTROL! family of application

performance management solutions for collaboration environments this past

January. While DYS currently offers solutions for Microsoft Exchange, IBM

Lotus Domino, IBM Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing (formerly

Sametime), and IBM Team Workplace, the CUI is used solely with IBM Lotus

Domino.

”CUI provides analysis reports of what’s happening with the

collaboration of an application so IT can ‘efficientize’ this (process),

reduce the cost of ownership and increase the quality of service,” says

Wolff.

He also notes that beside its database-clean-up capabilities, CUI also

picks out which user profiles are not needed. Employees frequently come

and go in organizations for a variety of reasons. CUI determines when an

employee has left the company, or is on a leave of absence.

”Instead of having to go out and buy new user licences from platform

vendors, IT can recycle or retire the ID for the next employee,” says

Wolff. ”This also saves on maintenance fees.”

Wolff also says CUI’s Application Rationalization abilities are aimed at

organizations with remote offices. The software determines which

applications should be placed on the remote offices’ networks, as well as

where it’s not efficient to install them.

Pitts says Hewitt has about 87 worldwide remote offices, and about 300

global Domino servers, with more than 20,000 desktops accessing Domino

applications. He says these networks are much easier to monitor with the

CUI software.

”We get monthly reports which help us keep track of what is being

replicated… and what replicated data is really needed,” says Pitts.

”CUI goes through and cleans up everything for us.”

Wolff adds the CUI software has a ”work flow process” designed to

assure that databases aren’t deleted before they need to be. A company

may only need an application at the end of the year, or a user ID may

simply be unused while the employee is out on a leave-of-absence. CUI is

designed to detect these special situations.

”As the company grows, people put stuff on the databases and it grows,”

says Pitts. ”Usually if you need to add (an application), you can delete

one too.”

CUI has security benefits, as well. The software looks at who is using

which database and which users are trying to gain access to certain

information, as well as who shouldn’t be accessing a database, Wolff

says.

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