Feature

From Document Manager Magazine Vol 17 No 03 - May/June 2009

In a fragile economy and an expanding digital universe, asks Chris Blaik, Marketing Director, EMC EMEA, is it still possible to reduce total cost of ownership of content management, whilst having to manage more content than ever before?

Organisations worldwide are struggling to cope with exponential information growth. As John Gantz, Chief Research Officer for IDC, stated recently in an IDC study: "Contrary to popular belief, as the economy deteriorated in late 2008, the pace of digital information created and transmitted over the Internet, phone networks and airwaves actually increased." The study goes on to state that the 'Digital Universe' is expected to double in size every 18 months and by 2012 five times as much digital information will have been created compared to 2008 (EMC-sponsored IDC study: "As the Economy Contracts, the Digital Universe Expands", May 2009).

Coupled with this growth is an internal pressure on companies, created by the uncertainty of a struggling economy, to reduce their IT costs. The challenge facing a lot of companies is juggling the ability to access scalable solutions that will accommodate future growth in their business while keeping their total cost of ownership (TCO) down. While the pace of digital information growth increased dramatically in 2009, IT budgets declined, creating an even bigger gap between information generated and IT resources deployed to support this data.

KEY FACTORS INFLUENCING FUTURE DATA GROWTH Over the next four years, the number of information-generation technologies and interactions is poised to grow dramatically. According to the above- mentioned study, 600 million more people will become internet users and mobile use will grow by a factor of 3.0 and data will account for an increasing amount of mobile use. Non-traditional IT devices such as wireless meters, automobile navigation systems, industrial machines, RFID readers, and intelligent sensor controllers are projected to more than triple. And interactions between people via email, messaging, social networks, etc are set

to grow by a factor of 8.0.

Economic stimulus efforts will also increase the amount of digital information created, as will the doubling of e-commerce over the next 3 years. Beyond that, a growth in "security sensitive" data from 30% of all data to 45% by the end of 2012 will put pressure on organisations to ensure high standards of data protection in their technology. Information compliance, suggests the study, will also drive more mandated record- keeping compliance.

Although a lot of the projected growth in data will be via user- generated content it is businesses that will be responsible for managing this data and keeping it secure. So it is important that any enterprise content management (ECM) solution be future- proof to accommodate exponential data growth and secure enough to guarantee information security and compliance. Coupled with this is the need for a solution that is flexible enough to adapt to the changing nature of an enterprise without the associated costs spiralling.

EMC has recently launched Documentum 6.5 as a solution that combines enterprise scalability with very low TCO. The new version 6.5 is a family of products that marries the great user experience of Web 2.0 and the strength of the enterprise-class Documentum platform to deliver a balance between business agility and IT control. The solution provides several key innovations that deliver improved enterprise performance and scalability, federated records management, as well as accelerated transactional business processes.

To back-up its scalability and lowest TCO regarding the new Documentum, EMC conducted a benchmark study to demonstrate its software's performance characteristics for a range of processing volumes in a specific configuration. The idea being that customers and prospects can then use this information to determine the software, hardware and network configurations necessary to support their processing volumes. The primary goal of the benchmarking effort is to provide as many data points as possible to support this important decision.

THE TEST ENVIRONMENT EMC Documentum partnered with Microsoft and HP in November 2008 to conduct what was the largest ever ECM industry benchmark. They set out to simulate 100,000 users of EMC Documentum's Webtop 6.5 SP1 interface engaging in a variety of content management related transactions and to sustain that load over the length of a work day. The environment was built on HP's latest server technology running Microsoft Enterprise Edition server software.

The benchmark was conducted with the understanding that enterprises often incur substantial additional costs when attempting to meet today's required scalability requirements. EMC designed Documentum 6.5 with these challenges in mind, as the solution is aimed at helping organisations contain total cost of ownership. To that end, Documentum ECM 6.5 allows for many more concurrent users per application server than previous versions of Documentum software - enabling customers to scale larger while reducing their hardware costs from their current implementation.

All Documentum software applications were installed on HP ProLiant Blade servers at Microsoft's Enterprise Engineering Center (EEC). The EEC can tackle the most complex re-creations of real enterprise production environments. Creating a real-world scenario in a controlled environment allows customers to put EMC technologies to the test before implementing solutions in their own environments.

Multiple tests were conducted and used to collect the metrics reported in this summary. Transaction processing times and system utilisation were measured for all tests. The tests were conducted in a controlled environment

with no other applications running for a period over 12 hours.

RESULTS The 100,000 user environment carried out/supported a total of 9 million transactions and 38 million application server hits over the 12 hour workday period thus highlighting the throughput and sustainability of the new Documentum solution. Key benchmark results achieved by Documentum 6.5 include:

• 748,000 transactions per hour

• 0.86 seconds average response time

• 878 applications server hits per second

For customers, these dramatic results mean companies deploying EMC Documentum 6.5 can now experience unprecedented levels of scalability and dramatic reductions in total cost of ownership.

The benchmark demonstrated a significant reduction in the hardware resources required per transaction when compared to prior Documentum releases. Improvements have been made at all tiers of the application with enhanced third-party software integration, eliminating many bottlenecks. A reduction in TCO of 50% was noted over the prior releases.

The benchmark testing of 100,000 EMC Documentum 6.5 (Webtop) users is not only 10 times larger than any other published benchmarking study in the ECM industry, it was achieved while dramatically reducing the overall TCO over previous versions of EMC Documentum. Companies that deploy EMC Documentum 6.5 on top of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 will be able to take advantage of the reduced system footprint, resulting in improvements in total cost of ownership at rates greater than 50% over previous EMC Documentum versions to help users satisfy their need to accommodate increasing amounts of data while keeping IT costs down. More info: www.emc.com

Feature