Fishbowl’s worked with Oracle WebCenter Content customers that have stored as low as 7,000 documents in their content server and as high as 20 million. We are currently working with the customer that has the 20 million documents in their repository to discuss their options of upgrading to Oracle WebCenter Content 12c. The options being discussed include maintaining their on premise instances, or moving their instances to the Oracle Cloud leveraging Oracle Bare Metal.
As part of these cloud consulting engagements, we seek to understand their content management use cases and the content they are currently storing and managing. This customer is a large manufacturer. They store a variety of documents related to their industry including CAD drawings, but they also store business documents like invoices. The invoices are only accessed, on average, once per year but need to be retained for 7 years. They are stored on the same SAN disk array as the CAD drawings and other content, which are accessed more frequently and need to be presented to users quickly. This means they are paying the same per item storage cost to store invoices, CAD drawings, and other content.
A more efficient and economical storage strategy could be utilized with Oracle’s HSM solution. Oracle HSM software manages data between storage tiers to enable organizations to utilize the acquisition and operational cost differences between flash, disk, tape, devices, and the cloud. With Oracle HSM, large WCC environments like our 20 million item customer could store various content types automatically and transparently on the most cost effective storage medium based on retention policies, retrieval frequency and speed necessary. Such capabilities would better align the storage costs with organizational priorities as well as ease management overhead.
HSM could also alleviate any file storage cost concern of getting content off employee hard drives, file shares or other repositories into Oracle WebCenter Content. Content such as photographs used in a company branding or marketing campaign could be checked into WebCenter for long-term archival and directed to an economical storage medium via HSM. Not only does this ensure that high-value, expensive assets like professional photographs can be searched and found easily, it also enables them to be repurposed at a later time – alleviating the overall storage cost concern.
I’ve included below some more resources on Oracle HSM. The Oracle HSM team has even put together a storage cost calculator. Oracle HSM can also be used for video storage. How much storage costs could HSM save your organization?
http://www.oracle.com/us/media/calculator/tieredstorage/index.html
- Web Page: https://www.oracle.com/storage/tape-storage/hierarchical-storage-manager/index.html
- Features: https://www.oracle.com/storage/tape-storage/hierarchical-storage-manager/features/index.html
- Brochure: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/035865.pdf
- Video Storage Info: https://www.oracle.com/content-storage-management/solutions/diva-content-storage/index.html
