The first day of my first EMC World conferences and specially the ones from Momentum wich covers the Enterprise Content Division (ECD) products/solutions/strategies aso. The start was great, being in Las Vegas where you have the feeling you are on another planet, I had the same feel during the General Session or the ECD Keynote; each time good explanations coupled with good shows.

The information I have got was interresting and some questions came in my mind. Questions that I hope can be answered in the next days.

InfoArchive

Before attending the General Session I went to another one which was about EMC InfoArchive. Today I work mainly with the Documentum Content Server and products around it like xPlore, ADTS, D2 aso.

To be prepared for new futur customer requests and challenges I wanted to see what is behind InfoArchive. Let’s give some points:

  • One main goal of using InfoArchive is to reduce the cost of the storage and to keep the assets.
  • Once legacy applications are shut down, you can archive their data into InfoArchive. You can also use it to archive data from active applications where you can build some rules to define which data will be moved to InfoArchive. And this can be done for flat, complex as well as, of course, for document records.
  • When the data are saved into InfoArchive, you can use xQuery, xForm to retrieve the data and display them in a way the user wants to see it.

That’s on the general overview. On a technical point of view here some information:

  • The Archive Service is build using a Data Service (xDB data server) and/or a Content Server. In case you have to archive only metadata the xDB service is sufficient.
  • The storage to be used is obviously the EMC storages but other ones can also be used meaning this solution can be implemented in more type of infrastructures.
  • To the question what is archived, the answer is SIP (Submission Information Package). You have a SIP descriptor  and SIP Data (metadata or/and Content)
  • LWSO objects are stored to use less storage
  • The search is done first against the AIP (Archive Info Packages) and once the object is found, against the AIU (Archive Info Unit).There is no fulltext available on the InfoArchive layer, the reason is that an archive system does not use it in general.
  • RPS can be used to manage the retention.

Open questions

So that for the “facts”, now there are some other open points which could be raised in case InforArchive will be used. You can save you data in normal XML formats but you can also define how the data are saved and how you want to search them. In this case who will manage that, the Record&Archive team or do you need first a business analyste? Can the defined model easily be changed for the current archived information? There are technical questions but I think the organization has first to be defined to have a successfull implementation of InfoArchive

Again, some questions are coming in my mind. And again, let’s see if I can have some answers in … the next days.