Why Data Virtualization is Valuable
Large enterprises and government agencies face similar challenges:
- Constant business change necessitates rapid IT response
- Growing data volumes and complexity increase risk and reduce agility
- Financial constraints necessitate cost-effective IT solutions
Following virtualization’s established path of storage, servers, applications, and now data itself—data virtualization is the proven way to overcome these challenges and fulfill critical information needs, significantly faster with far fewer resources.
Advance beyond physical integration to accelerate business success
What is Data Virtualization
Data virtualization is used to integrate data from multiple, disparate sources - anywhere across the extended enterprise - in a unified, logically virtualized manner for consumption by nearly any front-end business solution, including portals, reports, applications, search, and more.
Data virtualization is typically deployed at two levels, often as a complement to other integration approaches such as consolidation or replication. At the project level, it can virtually integrate the data required in support of a specific application or use case. On an enterprise level, it can be implemented as common services or as a loosely-coupled data abstraction layer to share data across multiple solutions and use.
How Data Virtualization is Used
As users scale adoption from project to enterprise, data virtualization middleware most frequent uses include:
- Data Federation
- Data Warehouse Extension
- Enterprise Data Sharing
- Real-time Enterprise Data Infrastructure
- Cloud Data Integration
Data Virtualization Platform
How Composite Software’s Data Virtualization Works
To increase agility, reduce risk, and cut costs, Composite data virtualization addresses data integration’s fundamental challenges:
- Data Complexity – Data is difficult to identify and understand. Composite’s data discovery simplifies the complexity challenge by automatically identifying relevant data and relationships and accelerating data model validation.
- Data Structure – Data isn’t always in the required form. Composite’s data abstraction overcomes data structure incompatibility by transforming data from its native structure and syntax into reusable views and data services that conform to standards and are easy for solutions developers to understand and solutions to consume.
- Data Location – Data resides in multiple locations and sources. Composite’s data access overcomes the location challenge by providing data required by consuming solutions as if it were available from a single virtual location, rather than where it is actually stored.
- Data Completeness – Data frequently needs to be combined with other data to provide insight. Composite’s data federation combines data to form more meaningful information. Data can be federated from both consolidated stores such as the enterprise data warehouse as well as original sources such as transaction systems.
- Data Latency – Up-to-the-minute data is often a key business requirement. Composite’s data delivery provides the timely data required by consuming solutions whenever needed, without impacting source system performance.
Composite’s data virtualization platform supports both a complete software development lifecycle and high reliability operation.
During requirements development and high level design, Composite Discovery helps to discover key data and relationships. At build time, the Composite Information Server provides two easy-to-use development environments with automated code generators that abstract data into relational views for reporting and other business intelligence (BI) uses or data services for SOA initiatives, portals, etc.
At run time, the Composite Information Server, along with Composite Active Cluster and Composite Application Data Services options, provide high-performance query capabilities that securely access, federate, transform, and deliver data to consuming business solutions whenever needed, 24 by 7.
Who Uses Composite Data Virtualization
Leading enterprises across a range of industries rely on Composite.
The Bottom Line
Data virtualization, following the proven path of storage, server, and applications virtualization, overcomes physical complexity to accelerate business initiatives, reduce risk and radically lower IT costs. Purpose-built as a lower cost, more agile approach that overcomes data complexity and silos, Composite data virtualization provides business with the timely data it needs to meet today’s business challenges.
