In today’s fast-moving enterprise environment, the ability to manage, archive and retire large volumes of business data — while controlling cost, ensuring access and meeting compliance — is increasingly critical. For organizations that have relied on legacy solutions such as IBM InfoSphere Optim to archive transactional, historical and application-data over many years, the challenge is becoming acute. In this article we explore why Optim users are facing growing risk, how a modern alternative such as SOLIXCloud can deliver a future-ready platform, and what steps enterprise IT and compliance teams should take to migrate with confidence.
Legacy archiving under pressure
The IBM InfoSphere Optim suite has been a long-standing choice for structured-data archiving, test-data subsetting and application retirement. But several industry signals now point to serious limitations when used in the present era of hybrid cloud, unstructured content and strict regulatory compliance. One significant trigger: IBM officially announced the withdrawal of marketing, entitlements and support for key Optim components effective December 16, 2022. The practical implication is stark: for organisations that archived critical business records into Optim’s proprietary archive files, ODBC/JDBC connectivity (via the Optim “Connect” technologies) may no longer be supported — meaning access, query and reporting on those archives becomes uncertain. Compliance officers, auditors and CIOs alike should recognise this as more than a maintenance issue: it is a potential business-risk, governance-failure and hidden cost event.Beyond support withdrawal, other pain-points include:
- Optim’s original design oriented heavily toward structured relational databases. It often struggles to ingest or meaningfully exploit semi-structured (JSON, logs) or unstructured data (documents, file systems) in today’s enterprise mix.
- Inefficiencies in archiving large-scale data growth, cloud-native storage and retrieval, and self-service access for business users.
- Operational cost: licence, upkeep, and the complexity of maintaining legacy dependencies (especially if the archive platform is wound into old applications, mainframes, or older DB2/Oracle stacks).
- Governance and compliance gaps: as data types proliferate and regulations (GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA) require fine-grained control, legal-hold, eDiscovery and auditable metadata, legacy-only tools become harder to justify.
In short: If your enterprise is still relying on Optim for archival, you should ask if you are simply maintaining the past — or proactively managing the future.
What a modern archival platform must deliver
Given the above pressures, CIOs, data governance leads and compliance officers should expect a modern archiving/data-retirement platform to deliver these core capabilities:
- Any-data ingestion: structured, semi-structured and unstructured data across ERP/CRM, custom apps, files, email, logs and mainframe sources.
- Compliance-centric architecture: policy-based retention, automatic purge/manual purge controls, legal-hold and eDiscovery support, full audit trail and chain-of-custody.
- Open access & integration: self-service search, reporting, ODBC/JDBC/REST API connectivity; no vendor-lock proprietary archive format that limits access.
- Cloud-native scalability and cost-efficiency: pay-as-you-go consumption, multi-cloud support, elastic storage and lower infrastructure footprint.
- Governance & metadata intelligence: enterprise metadata repository, lineage, classification of sensitive/PII data, and governance controls built in.
- Application retirement and elimination of technical debt: ability to decommission legacy applications while retaining access to historical data in an archive repository.
These attributes are increasingly table stakes for any enterprise archiving platform that is expected to hold up for the next decade.
SOLIXCloud: the replacement path
Enter SOLIXCloud (and specifically the SOLIXCloud Enterprise Archiving offering) — positioned as a full-scope replacement for IBM InfoSphere Optim. According to vendor-published documentation, SOLIXCloud offers the means to migrate Optim archive files into a modern multi-cloud data-fabric environment while preserving access, governance and compliance. Solix Technologies, Inc.+1Some of the key differentiators worth highlighting:
- Preserves access & mitigates archival lock-in risk: The core risk of Optim users losing ODBC/JDBC connectivity is addressed by migrating to SOLIXCloud, where full access, search and reporting is restored on an open platform.
- Mixed-data type archive capability: While Optim was optimized for structured database data, SOLIXCloud supports archive of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data (ERP/CRM, file shares, email, IoT, log-streams).
- Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) baked-in: Through policy-based retention rules, purge-management, legal hold, self-service search and reporting, SOLIXCloud brings ILM features that help governance and performance.
- Cloud cost model & flexibility: The “archive-as-a-service” consumption model, multi-cloud support and cloud scale storage help reduce infrastructure/maintenance cost while aligning with modern architecture.
- Application retirement & data-centre consolidation support: If your enterprise is retiring legacy applications (ERP, custom apps tied to Optim), SOLIXCloud supports decommissioning while preserving data access, reducing licence/maintenance burdens.
By choosing SOLIXCloud, enterprises can move from a legacy-only archive state into a more open, governed, future-proof environment.
Migration strategy: how to make it work
Migrating off Optim and onto SOLIXCloud (or any modern alternate) is a strategic initiative, not simply a technical project. Here's a suggested high-level approach:
- Assessment & inventory
- Catalogue all archived data files currently held in Optim (structured tables, archive files, references, extractors).
- Classify by business-value, compliance-criticality, access-frequency, format and source application.
- Identify “at-risk” archive sets (where Optim access is already becoming unsupported or obsolete) and prioritise them.
- Define business & compliance requirements
- What retention rules apply? Are there legal holds on any of the archived data? What SLAs exist for retrieval/query?
- What users need access to archived content (business users, compliance teams, auditors)? What formats and query capabilities?
- What metadata/lineage/business-context must be preserved? Archives are only useful if business context remains accessible.
- Design target/archive architecture
- Define how the archive will live in the new environment (multi-cloud, hybrid).
- Define ingestion/validation processes: archive-file ingestion from Optim, validate completeness, confirm referential integrity if needed.
- Define access layer: self-service search, API access, ODBC/JDBC queries, structured reporting as required.
- Define governance & compliance layer: retention engine, legal-hold management, audit trail, metadata repository.
- Migration & conversion
- Develop migration paths: extract from Optim, convert or map archive-files to SOLIXCloud storage/model, validate retrieval functions.
- Run pilot migrations of non-critical archive sets to validate performance, access, user-experience.
- Gradually move mission-critical archive content, with business validation and sign-off.
- Retire the Optim archive environment (reducing license, maintenance cost) while keeping archived data accessible in the new system.
- Stakeholder and user readiness
- Communicate to business users, compliance teams and auditors about how retrieval/search will work in the new platform.
- Provide training for self-service search and reporting.
- Update policies and governances (e.g., data-retention schedules, legal-hold procedures) to reference the new archive environment.
- Ongoing operations & governance
- Once in production, monitor usage, retrieval SLAs, user-satisfaction, cost/benefit metrics (e.g., infrastructure cost reduction, user-query time improvement).
- Run periodic audits to ensure compliance with retention rules, deletion policies, legal-holds and data-governance.
- Leverage analytics on archived data to extract business value (for example historical trends, aggregated reporting) rather than simply letting it sit dormant.
The business case: cost, risk and value
Replacing a legacy archiving platform such as Optim is not solely about avoiding risk — it is also about unlocking value and controlling cost. Key dimensions:
- Risk mitigation: As Optim’s support and connectivity decline, the risk that archived data becomes inaccessible, non-compliant or orphaned grows. This alone can justify action.
- Cost savings: Moving to a cloud-based archival platform reduces infrastructure and licensing burden. Retiring legacy applications tied to Optim freeing up staff/maintenance cost.
- Performance & agility: A modern archive supports faster ingestion, better search and self-service, enabling business users and compliance teams to act more quickly.
- Governance and compliance: Modern platforms provide stronger controls: retention policies, legal-holds, metadata lineage and audit-trail — reducing exposure to regulatory fines and audit failures.
- Data-value realization: Archived data is often untapped business value. With a searchable, governed archive, organizations can unlock historical insights, analytics and intelligence from data previously “locked” in legacy silos.
When you put these together, a migration to a platform such as SOLIXCloud represents not just a cost-cutting exercise, but a modernization investment: reducing risk, improving governance, enabling business agility, and laying the foundation for analytics and future data-use scenarios.
Concluding thoughts
In a time when data volumes continue to grow, regulatory mandates continue to tighten, and enterprises are shifting toward cloud-first, data-driven operations, legacy archiving solutions like IBM InfoSphere Optim just aren’t built for the next decade. The risk of staying, in terms of access loss, compliance failure and cost escalation, is real.By contrast, a modern, cloud-native archival platform like SOLIXCloud offers a future-ready path: open access, multi-data format support, strong governance, scalability and cost-efficiency.
For IT leaders, data-governance teams and compliance officers, the decision becomes clear: don’t simply maintain your archives — transform them.If your organisation is still running Optim-based archives, now is the time to evaluate your risk, assess your migration strategy, and act. The archives you retain are only as valuable as the access, governance and insight you can drive from them. Transitioning to a platform built for modern enterprise archiving is not just a migration — it’s a strategic enabler.
