Have you ever tried riding a bicycle with under-inflated tires? It’s hard for the human engine to push it ahead. Pump it up; it seems like you’re gliding on air. Well the same is true for your car, and we are wasting so much fuel as a nation running cars with underinflated tires and badly tuned engines that President Obama talked about it during the election campaign.

How bad is this problem? In 2005 students at Carnegie Mellon University checked the tire pressure on 81 cars parked on campus. They only found one vehicle with properly inflated tires. The rest were under-inflated by an average of 20%. At that time gasoline was $3 per gallon, close to the price today, and the students calculated that each of those 80 drivers would save $432 per year based on typical driving just by inflating their tires to the manufacturer’s recommended pressure and this does not include the decrease in tire wear and resulting savings in fewer blowouts.

According to, fueleconomy.gov the gas savings for having a properly tuned car is 16 cents per gallon. The savings from properly inflated tires varies, but the site says 1% of fuel economy is lost for every 2 psi of under inflation. Fixing a car that is noticeably out of tune or has failed an emissions test can improve its gas mileage by an average of 4%, although results vary based on the kind of repair and how well it is done. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that at least a quarter of drivers are cruising around on under-inflated tires. The Rubber Manufacturers Association, Auto Club, California Highway Patrol and Yokohama Tire Company used those statistics, along with Department of Transportation and Automobile Association of America data, to extrapolate that 2.8-billion gallons of gas are lost every year due to under-inflation of tires.

What an inexpensive tire gauge can do for your wallet, the world economy and the environment, Solix EDMS in your data center can do the same. Right Tire pressure or right tiered data in your data center, both yield huge returns. Database Archiving and Application Retirement can decrease the number of servers and spinning disks on the floor, saving valuable space and cutting energy and cooling use, and therefore cost and carbon emissions. And by managing the size of active data it can delay the addition or upgrade of storage servers and disks, saving capital funds, which have become scarce in this economy.

The U.S. Congress is working now on a major clean energy legislation. While the focus of debate and news coverage has been on Clean Energy and creation of jobs. The motivation, of course, is the environment and global warming. Well, if you are looking to do something that benefits yourself, country and the world:

• Buy a tire gauge for your vehicle and use it at the start of every month
• Implement Solix EDMS in your data center

Sai Gundavelli with John Brust of Oracle Corporation discusses on how Solix EDMS is utilizing Oracle 11g to help lower storage costs for its customers while meeting data retention and compliance requirements.

Last month my Alma Mater, the University of Oklahoma (Sooners – National Football Champions for 7 years) invited me to speak to recent graduates. As you might expect, the bulk of the questions were about the economy, market conditions and the job market. That got me thinking about the all to real parallels to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Basically, we are seeing four of the major drivers of the Great Depression repeated in today’s economy:

• Total public and private debt in the United States equaled the US GNPO (for the first time since 1929);
• The stock markets crashed;
• Banks failed;
• Purchasing, both corporate and personal, has dropped precipitously in response, causing the first major deflation across the board since the early 1930s.

Underlying this is a very similar and unstable economic condition. For several years asset value increases have powered U.S, and to an extent world, consumer spending – basically people were living off the increase in asset value of their homes, stocks, and other real and financial properties, which in turn were driven by speculation rather than real increases in value. When those values stopped increasing the speculators bailed, and consumers could no longer afford to keep spending. Thus the underlying problem was that the economy was built on a shaky foundation.

In 1932 President Roosevelt’s answer to this situation was to create a new foundation for the economy based on building a strong infrastructure through the New Deal. This put many unemployed workers back to work, gave destitute families income and home, drove steady GNP growth starting in 1933, and produced the physical infrastructure on which the 50 year economic boom the United States enjoyed in the last half of the 20th Century was based. Today we still drive over roads and bridges built by the WPA in the 1930s.

So, what can we learn from New Deal? Obviously President Obama and his economic advisors are very aware of the importance of rebuilding and improving our infrastructure, and the budget Congress is now debating contains a great deal of money for infrastructure improvement. Today, however, infrastructure means more than roads, bridges, harbors, and airports. It also means strengthening and securing the power grid and the data infrastructure, which is just as important to tomorrow’s economy as paved roads were to the 1930s. And while the President and Congress look to the public parts of that data infrastructure, those of us who work in enterprise IT have a responsibility to strengthen Enterprise infrastructure. And part of that is clearing out the old and obsolescent to make room for the new, more efficient tools of the future, just as the fragile covered bridges of the 1920s needed to be replaced with concrete and steel by the WPA.

Many years back I met Charlie Garry, then an analyst at Meta Group, which later was acquired by Gartner. He presented a very interesting comparison. Imagine the state of your garage when you bought your new home — completely empty. You moved in and started accumulating things – boxes of old toys and clothes, tools, tires. One day the garage is full and you are parking your car in the driveway. You don’t know what you have and can’t find what you need in all the accumulated stuff that once was useful but now is just clutter. This is exactly what happens in many enterprise data centers. While hardware wears out or is replaced by something twice as fast, old software just migrates to the new platform. Like old clothes, obsolescent applications and the business methods the support, including work-arounds created because of their inadequacies, become comfortable to users, who often resist moving to newer replacements because those require changes in habits. The problem is that as long as those old applications are still around, neither the infrastructure nor, even more importantly, the business methods they support, can evolve to meet today’s needs. Today more than ever, businesses and government agencies have to change, often radically, to survive in an economy that is going through a major evolution from its very foundations up.

What data centers today need is application archiving and sunsetting strategies, not just as a one-time cleanup but instituted as part of the IT organization’s normal, ongoing operations. They require an annual review of all applications to determine whether they still meet the needs of the business. This requires support from C-level management (CEO, CFO, COO) and sometimes a degree of ruthlessness, but it will cut costs, and improve productivity and lay the foundation for growth.

Today Budweiser loves to bring out its Clydesdale horse teams and beer wagons designed after those of the 1890s, both in its ads and in person. But when it actually delivers beer, it uses the latest truck technology – diesel today, perhaps hybrid, all electric or hydrogen fuel cell tomorrow. IT needs that mentality – there is no harm in nostalgia, but living in the past is a recipe for disaster.

I am pleased to announce that Solix has signed an OEM agreement with Oracle Financial Services Software, a subsidiary of Oracle Corporation, world’s largest enterprise software company. With this –

• Oracle Flexcube customers will be able to buy the Solix EDMS Archiving functionality from Oracle
• By selecting Solix from among the several current competitors, Oracle effectively endorses Solix as a technological leader in its field

This could not come at a better time for Oracle Flexcube customers, given the turmoil in the financial services industry. With budgets slashed and layoffs common, the challenge for their CIOs is to get the best value for the money left in the budget. Their priorites need to be:

• Doing more with less
• Ensuring compliance in the most cost-efficient manner

Solix EDMS helps meet both these goals by automatically managing archiving of data that is no longer in active use but which is required for compliance. This improves Oracle Flexcube performance while decreasing costs by moving older data to inexpensive, inactive media, which decreases storage costs while making the infrastructure more agile. By decreasing the amount of data that needs to be backed up and restored, it also improves DR system performance. It also can accelerate data migration when implementing or upgrading Oracle Flexcube. This is particularly important for multi-national banks that cannot afford long Flexcube down times when upgrading or recovering from an outage.

Solix EDMS can also have a positive impact on Basel II compliance. Published in June 2004, Basel II is intended to create international standards on which banking regulators can base reserve requirements for capital banks to help protect the international financial system from the impacts of the collapse of financial institutions. In practice Basel II imposes rigorous risk and capital management requirements designed to ensure that banks retain appropriate levels of capital reserves, based on the risk level of their lending and investment practices. In general, the greater the risk to the bank, the greater the reserve required to safeguard its solvency and overall economic stability. The final version aims at:

• Ensuring that capital allocation is more risk sensitive
• Separating operational risk from credit risk, and quantifying both
• Attempting to align economic and regulatory capital more closely to reduce the scope for regulatory arbitrage.

Compliance requires that banks upgrade their risk management processes, technology, and corporate guidance. Information Lifecycle management can make a positive impact on achieving those goals while decreasing overall IT capital and operational costs. For instance, Basel II requires that financial institutions apply an EU-formulated Risk Assessment Model at the end of each day of trading to demonstrate the institution’s solvency. If it fails that test, it must inform the authorities immediately and cease trading. By reducing the amount of data involved, Solix EDMS lifecycle management can streamline the analysis process, delivering the results faster at less cost.

Overall, this agreement is a four-way win: A win for Solix, because it is now allied with the world’s largest enterprise software company; a win for Oracle because it can now provide Information lifecycle management to its Flexcube users; a win for Flexcube users because this is the moment where they need this most. And most important, a win for existing Solix customers who now can be assured that Solix EDMS is a very advanced solution and endorsed by Oracle.