EMC World 2009: Documentum Performance, Scalability, and Sizing, Part 1

This is the first of two sessions by Ed Bueche. His sessions are must-attends.  His sessions last year, part one and part two, are useful references, but as always, this year’s information takes precedence. Some information that Ed is presenting is available in the Architecture session notes.

  • Application Architecture, new certification, includes:
    • Designing data and security models
    • Lifecycles and business processes
    • Tools and APIs – DFC, BOG, DFS, Server Methods….
    • Application frameworks and user interfaces – WDK, TaskSpace, Forms Builder
    • Ingestion, search, and content transfer
    • focus on not just how, but why and when
  • System/Technical Architecture is about Hardware, Disk, OS, Scalability and Performance
  • WDK improvements since 5.3:
    • Global DFC object cache across all sessions
    • About 75% smaller footprint
  • “Materialization” is process for making a Light-weight sysobject into a normal sysobject
    • Materialization can be restricted
    • Can happen automatically or manually
  • The Partition-based ingestion is designed for multi-million+ objects at once.
  • Security Performance Improvements in D6.5 sp2
    • Two non-scaling issues
      • Many (1000+) groups-per-user, happens in rooms and DCE situations
      • Many accessors on an ACL list
    • Reducing caching helped
    • Improvements appear significant, but there may still be issues
  • Test the data and security models
  • Items pulled from Full Text are post-filtered at Content Server for Security
    • Users with highly restricted access that issue unselective queries can experience poor response time
    • Can customize Index Agent to pass security information into index for speed
    • EMC Search Services will have built-in Documentum security, significantly reducing this issue
  • RPC trace can now be used, look at dfc.tracing.* properties in dfc.properties file
    • Support Note esg90107 has awk scripts for processing the trace files
    • Can filter by user name
    • D6 and up
  • SourceOne information (Going fast here with time ending, will need to hit the slides)
    • Retention Services Archive controlled release data 2Q/3Q 2009
    • Limitations of FAST (14 mil objects) is why Content Server doesn’t serve Source One

Sitting still for the second session, though I may grab a quick cup of coffee.

Disclaimer

All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.

All statements about the future of EMC products and strategy are subject to change at any time due to a large variety of factors.