MEDIA
HELP
Author
Vasile Gavrila
Managing Consultant @ fme SRL
May 29, 2018
During the last decade spent in doing or supporting more than 220 migration projects, I have realized that in most of the cases the performance was one of the key indicators for a successful migration project. It is not solely important to get your data migrated correctly into the target system but also to meet the business deadlines that many times are quite tight. In the cloud era more and more ECM systems come with a web service API, therefore extracting or loading big loads of data becomes even more challenging than it is with on-premises systems.
For small migration projects (1-2 million documents) there is nothing special you need to consider in terms of hardware and software requirements. All migration-center components can be run on the same machine by following the requirements described in the installation guide.
For medium and large migration projects, migration-center comes with a powerful, scalable and flexible architecture that allows different components to be deployed on multiple machines for reaching the maximum performance that is allowed by the environment (especially by the source and target systems which are in most cases the bottleneck).
Every environment is different, not just in terms of the technical aspects or performance, but also in terms of people working on that system. For example end users, project managers or IT managers see and react differently to the migration and its requirements and implications. Therefore it is important to consider not just the technical factors but also the needs and possibilities of the people working with or managing the involved systems.
Over the time I could see a wide range of throughputs in different migration projects. I would like to share some examples here:
During migration projects, most of the processing time is consumed by the Jobserver for extracting and loading the data from/to the ECM system. The performance of this process is very dependent on the performance capabilities of the source and target systems.
The most common ways to improve the performance of extracting and loading the data I can recommend, are the following:
The performance of the client is highly dependent on the database performance thus it is recommended that the client and the database are running in the same segment of the network. They use the oracle client to communicate.
Nevertheless, I can suggest some hints that may result in a better performance when dealing with large amounts of data:
When dealing with large migration projects, sizing the systems and planning the deployment of migration-center for the best performance is not an easy task. You need to run extensive tests (both functional and performance related) before planning the production phase. The more complex the migration requirements and the infrastructure are, the more important the test phase is. But not only is the migration-center setup important, also the corresponding platforms (source and target) must be prepared to reach a suitable throughput. This is often forgotten.