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Author's profile photo Revathi M P

Data Destruction using SAP Information Lifecycle Management

Information lifecycle management is a solution which help you manage data during its cycle. It helps  to determine the validity of data and also help to delete them permanently. This in some aspects, is also compliance requirement to retain data for some period and then delete it mandatorily.

In this article I would cover the different ways to destroy (permanently deletion) data using ILM.

During data lifecycle, data resides in database or in an archive file in a compliant store. The tables where these data set resides can be part of an archiving object or not. Depending on that, it can be dealt differently for destruction.

 

 

The picture shown here depicts 3 aspects which are addressed in ILM for Destruction.

A. Data which is part of an archiving object definition but not relevant for archiving

B. Data which is part of archive object

C. Data which is NOT part of an archiving object

 

Case A:

Destruction of this can be triggered using the Write reports of the archiving object. Pre-requisite is archiving object should be ILM enables and all ILM configurations are done in the system.

From SARA -> Write step, in the report selection screen, one can choose the ILM action –  Data Destruction and execute.

During the execution, retention check is performed on the set of data. The data which has expired would be permanently deleted.

 

Case B:

Destruction of this can be triggered once the data is put into archive file via archiving process and archive file is stores in ILM aware store. During the archiving process, the expiration dates are determined. After crossing this date, the archive files can be destroyed. This can done via transaction ILM_DESTRUCTION.  Pre-requisite: Archive file should be stored into ILM aware store and should be expired.

 

Case C:

Destruction of this data set can be defined in the Destruction object definition. Using this destruction object(DOBJ), process can be triggered during which ILM rules are applied on data and checked for retention. Only the data which is expired would be deleted. This is triggered via the transaction ILM_DESTRUCTION.

 

With the ILM data destruction, we would successfully manage huge volumes of data, retain only the required set and can also adhere to compliance requirements. It would impact on TCO as data base is freed up and also required data is in a complaint, cost effective Storage media.

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      Author's profile photo Srinivasreddy Reguri
      Srinivasreddy Reguri

      Hi Revathi,

      We are planning for POC for SAP ILM along with Hadoop storage.

      Still now we dont have clarity whether ILM supports Hadoop storage?

      We have VIM componet in ECC system and the data directly stores in IXOS Archive server. Can we migrate the data from IXOS  to SAP ILM ?

      Can you please help with Architecture and functionality how it works without open text archive server.

      Please provide the reference documents.

       

      Regards,

      Srinivas Reddy

       

      Author's profile photo Revathi M P
      Revathi M P
      Blog Post Author

      Hello Srinivas,

       

      I would request you to raise this Q&A section of community page for everyone and tag to SAP ILM in the link below.

      https://answers.sap.com/tags/480041978550045079567539109400636

      Regards,
      Revathi

      Author's profile photo Anushka N
      Anushka N

      Hi Revathi,

      Does archiving checks carries out while destruction of data thru write program?

       

      Regards,

      Anushka

      Author's profile photo Revathi M P
      Revathi M P
      Blog Post Author

      Hello Anushka,

      IF the checks are part of the write program, then yes. Checks would be performed.

      Please use this link to raise questions. Tag: NW Information Lifecycle Management

      Regards,
      Revathi

      Author's profile photo Alejandro Mejias Pabon
      Alejandro Mejias Pabon

      Hi,

      we are migrating our current ECC implementation based on netweaver 7.40 DB2 to S4 Hana. We start with a greenfield implementation, and my question is if can we use ILM to archive data in ECC and after that, we could recover information from S4?

       

      Thanks