STORAGE

SAND Technology, an innovator in Analytic Application Infrastructure, today announced the general release of the SAND Searchable Archive product. SAND Searchable Archive is a critical new technology that provides high data compression rates for very efficient data storage without compromising the ability for business people to quickly access the data using standard Business Intelligence tools and methods. It is designed to work as a complementary data archive with SAND's innovative analytic application platform, SAND Analytic Server, and with other vendor's databases and data warehouse products. "Users should begin to incorporate database archiving as an aspect of overall data management and infrastructure maintenance," said Charlie Garry, senior program director at META Group, a leading provider of IT research, advisory services and strategic consulting. "We expect the database archive market to reach $2.4 billion by the end of 2007." Data warehouses are now reaching multiple terabytes in size, with no apparent end in sight. New regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II and the German GDPdU taxation legislation now mean that this data has to be kept accessible for a number of years. SAND Searchable Archive is designed to help organizations manage this runaway growth while maintaining service levels to data consumers. "The combination of continued dramatic increases in the amounts of business data with the new regulatory and compliance environment now requires organizations to keep more data for more time in a user-accessible form," said Arthur Ritchie, SAND's Chief Executive Officer. "The SAND Searchable Archive was developed to allow organizations to fight warehouse tera-flation by efficiently keeping their historic data at lower storage costs, and still having it easily accessible to business users when it is needed." SAND Searchable Archive is a highly compact analytic repository that typically stores data in less than 10% of the space required by an equivalent relational data warehouse. Early production installations have yielded 80%-90% compression of input data, which translates to at least 95% compression in comparison to a similar indexed relational database. SAND Searchable Archive's read-only archive files can be searched using standard Business Intelligence tools and methods without decompressing the data first. In nearline applications, the selected data can be efficiently restored to the online warehouse or analytic server. In offline configurations, the selected data is queried in place without the need to restore it. Users can configure the speed of data selection by adjusting the available server and storage resources, using less expensive media when storage cost is the underlying driver, and higher-performance resources, disc and servers when speed of data access is critical. Because the data access rate corresponds linearly with CPU usage, query speeds against the compressed files can approach or even exceed those achieved against the source warehouse. SAND Searchable Archive can be deployed on Windows, Linux or UNIX servers. Product pricing varies based on the amount of data being stored in the archive. SAND Technology provides organizations worldwide with a unique vantage point from which to survey the competitive landscape. SAND's advanced analytic data management products empower users with a better understanding of their business environment through better access to their business data. SAND Technology-based solutions include CRM analytics, web analytics, financial analysis and specialized Business Intelligence applications for government and security, healthcare, telecommunications, financial services, retail and other business sectors. SAND Technology has offices in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Central Europe, and is traded on NASDAQ under the symbol SNDT. For more information, visit www.sand.com.