HP finally integrated its database archiving acquisition with last week's introduction of its HP Database Archiving software, which lets customers accelerate the deployment of archiving projects and retain data for regulatory compliance, which reduces support costs. (Compare Network Auditing and Compliance products)

In February 2006, HP acquired Outerbay. It integrated Outerbay’s software and reintroduced it with a new visual design environment that helps customer deploy projects more quickly. In addition, HP added support for SQL Server 2005 and new capabilities for Oracle databases.

The new version lets customers retain, search and retrieve critical database information for the entire data lifecycle, from creation through destruction.

By supporting both Oracle and SQL Server database environments, HP believes it supports 75% of the open database market. The company will support db2 environments in the future.

Oracle customers using partitioning as part of their information management strategies can now use HP Database Archiving to archive complete sets of data spanning both partitioned and non-partitioned tables.

HP Database Archiving competes with IBM’s Information Management products, which it acquired in September 2007 when it picked up Princeton Softech.

Further HP Database Archiving supports standards such as XML archiving for long-term data retention. The product is available now.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW.