eCentron has helped many of its clients reduce the size of their
production and test environments by as much as 50% by utilizing SAP
standard and eCentron custom utilities. eCentron has extensive experience
using SAP’s archiving and DART (see descriptions below) toolsets
and can provide the customer with ongoing archiving and data warehousing
deliverables
that can then easily be supported by existing application personnel.
eCentron’s custom toolset allows archiving and DART processes
to be seamlessly integrated into the production environment and monitored
and maintained with minimal effort. Audit requirements for data retention
can often be met 100% by the implementation of the standard DART
archiving module. Implementation of the standard archive and delete
modules coupled with the DART audit tool can quickly recover valuable
disk space. eCentron often delivers at least a ten fold ROI for the
amount of DASD saved to the cost of the service provided. eCentron’s
data management toolset coupled with our data warehouse expertise
can provide much improved system performance, reduce DASD costs and
fulfill all the standard data retention, retrieval, and reporting
requirements requested by your users and required your audit department.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Archiving?
SAP Supplied tool to Delete Application Data
Data is first extracted to files and then
deleted using the extracted files as an index
Deleted data is
not readily available for reporting or display using standard
SAP functionality
SAP data is organized into archive objects
which allow some control of when data can be archived.
Archived
data can be reloaded to the system in case of emergency
Some
Archive Objects allow individual display of archived data
in a limited SAP defined format
Data is deleted from the system
and is not available for reporting unless it is unloaded
to other tools
before deletion
Third party utilities
(PBS) are available to view archive data in a more acceptable
format
but the
data access
time can be a limiting
factor
What is DART?
DART stands for Data Retention Tool
Requested by ASUG for retention
of tax data and developed by SAP
Provides data to the IRS in
response to an Information Document Request(IDR)
Approved for
use by the IRS (procedure 98-25 published March 1998)
Accepted
for use by all major accounting firms as an approved audit data
source
Self defined extract file
Includes all relevant master data at
the time of extract
Configurable to cover a variety of user needs
Includes customizable
user exits to extract data not included in the standard DART
configuration
Contains an indexed directory for DART file management
without using Archive Link
Supports the definition
of multiple extract views which enhance data analysis
Provides
mechanisms to extract and combine separate DART extracts
