The Tech Data Cloud & Automation (C&A) has several products that move data between different source applications. In choosing this product you have chosen a cost effective and cost reducing approach to fulfilling your enterprises data needs.

The Data Pump is a means of moving asset descriptive data from your Discovery or Source Application to your CMDB or Target Application. Also moved into the Target Application are the relationships that exist between the assets. Depending on the Target Application, the data is often moved into a staging dataset or import dataset. Also, there is often a special process, a reconciliation process, to merge the newly updated data into the dataset for production use.

The data in your Source Application is usually used by administrators to maintain the assets under their care. That puts this data under constant scrutiny as administrators use the Source Application to maintain far more systems than they would normally be able to handle manually. Thus, the data in the Source Application could be a gold mine to asset managers and other financial administrators since it is vetted information from hardware and software asset administrators. Such information, with the help of the Data Pump, can now be used for financial analysis, and management operations. Such needs as maintenance planning, asset life-cycle planning, compliance evaluation, and software and hardware license administration are greatly enhanced by such information. Importing such data provides a basis for incident management, problem management, software asset management, service level management, and the structure of the service book.

This Data Pump mapping system was designed to be easy to use. Its most obvious design feature for ease-of-use is that most panels in the User Interface operate like spreadsheets, So some familiarity with the concepts of spreadsheet manipulation can be used to adjust the results to the operator’s needs.

Finally, ease-of-understanding couples with ease-of-use, in that there is very little that happens “under the table” almost everything that happens in the Extract, Transform, and Load processes are visible to the operator. This transparency is experienced through becoming familiar with the product by moving single rows or small numbers of rows of data to the Target Application and then evaluating results in the Target Application.

The Data Pump also has an extremely effective Graphical User Interface configuration mode, with tools that allow for careful construction, adjustment, and verification of data mappings as the client’s environment evolves and the analysis needs increase. Mapping processes can, in effect be run one row at a time, and pieces source data can be entered by hand to evaluate specific transformation and update results.

The Data Pump has several internal features that are specifically designed to decrease network utilization, and other features to reduce server disk activity. The Data Pump has gone through many design cycles to be among the most, if not the most efficient ETL tool available to load data into the Target Applications we support. This efficiency is the result of the C&A team being intensely aware of the source and the target data structures and their access mechanisms and also aware of the problem many large clients have with massive numbers of CIs.

The Data Pump is automated, easy to use and supports ITIL.

Key benefits include:

• Documented and configurable predefined maps ready to be used immediately.
• Full load and delta updates are automated but can also be explicitly set.
• Multi-threaded updates can be configured to boost performance.
• For Data Pump Source Applications and Target Applications our products can work with Applications that are under their manufacturer support, and often to older versions of the Applications as well
• Multi-tenancy Target mode is built in for CMDBs.
• Great performance improvements, especially when dealing 1+ millions of data.
• Flexible and powerful configuration & mapping,
• With the Normalization Tool, normalize the source data.
• With the Report Tool, create reports of source to target differences.
• High performance, run as a service or daemon,
• Feeds CMDB Asset License Management applications.
• Commercially supported product to stay current with your Source and Target version updates.
• Automated updates of the hardware and software inventory as managed by the Source Application.
• Update schedule can be set for the customer’s specific requirements
• Best practice mapping and reconciliation of CIs and relationships the CMDB Target Applications.
• Feeds supporting data to ITIL Configuration Management, Asset Management, Incident Management, Proble Management, SLA Management processes across tool and organizational boundaries by synchronizing attribute data & state data.
• Built under contract agreements (TAP) with MSFT and BMC, and ITIL best practices