The traditional approach to ensuring access to your data within the workflow was to use responsive and expensive storage (such as scale out NAS) while content is being worked on and then migrate it to cheaper and inaccessible storage (like tape) for long-term retention. Throughout this process backups are continuously made costing time, money and resources. To add to the problem, as data sets grow, backup windows do too and ultimately take so long they impact your operations. The solution is a single tier of storage with built in data protection that is massively scalable, globally accessible and cost effective.
Simplicity and Efficiency
Caringo object storage software simplifies this process for most unstructured content use cases providing better responsiveness than NAS with lower costs than tape on an intelligent and scalable platform that can utilize any x86 server hardware. The result is a single tier of storage that can be easily integrated into your workflow and used for the long-term retention of data.
- Self-optimizing — Even after an object is initially stored CAStor continuously monitors performance and will automatically move or replicate data in order to maintain responsiveness in the system.
- Runs on industry standard hardware — Storage clusters can be built on any X86 server with at least 1 GB of RAM, 1 hard drive, and Gigabit Ethernet. Use any combination of vendors and generations. As new technology becomes available, just plug the server in and CAStor will instantly provision it!
- Massively scale capacity – meet any demand — Scale by simply inserting one or more nodes into the cluster. Additional capacity is automatically available; no provisioning by an administrator. Minimize administrative overhead to increase storage up to petabytes of capacity in a single cluster.
- No file system limitations — Universally unique IDs stored in a flat address space eliminate the complexity of hierarchical file system architectures. There are no limits on quantity of files and no capacity limits. Achieve the performance of primary storage for content of all types, large or small.
Vivium migrates a multi-million document archive within a short timeframe.
Vivium, a member of the P&V GROUP and the third largest insurance company in Belgium working with brokers, needed to migrate a multi-million document archive and make it accessible to its 300+ internal users all within a short timeframe. XeniT successfully set up a full archiving environment where documents from multiple sources such as scanners, mainframe, and COLD CD's, are in a continuous process automatically imported and filed based on metadata values. To guarantee high availability of the data stored, XeniT integrated Alfresco with CAStor. The disaster recovery architecture provides for configurable replication of the documents between Antwerp and Brussels.
The Challenge
- Develop a document archive in less than six months
- Store files from multiple sources (scanners, mainframes, COLD CDs...)
- Must be accessible to 300+ internal users
- Need for a disaster recovery plan
The Solution
- XeniT integrated Alfresco with CAStor
- Migrated existing 3M+ documents into archive
- Filing information and directory structure was stored in meta-data
- Two site replication for DR in Antwerp and Brussels
The Results
- Retrieval of content was optimized through custom search screens
- The solution now supports over 5M documents, increasing at 16,000 pages per day with a peak load of 1M+ documents in 14 days
- Over 500 employees and brokers now have instant access to the archive
The Configuration
