Alfresco + EMC Centera

[munwar]

Earlier there were few requests to extend Alfresco's storage support to CAS systems like EMC Centera. Not sure whether any one has tried this in the past.

We are looking at storing millions of documents in EMC Centera and store the meta-data in Alfresco for security, search and retrieval purposes.

Has any one integrated EMC Centera storage with Alfresco?

Has any one tried mounting EMC Centera storage as File System Storage for Alfresco CMS.  There are various third party products available in the market which provides such solution.  Few products are:

Gateway products such as “Storage Switch” (Centera FS Gateway - http://www.storageswitch.com/public/pdf/CenteraGW.pdf)
Storage Switch is a robust gateway for EMC’s Centera. Using the product you can take advantage of standard file system protocols such as NFS, CIFS, HTTP, FTP to store, retrieve and manage your data.

Another such solution is CAStor FSG (from Caringo - http://www.caringo.com/pdfs/CAStorFSG_datasheet_080131.pdf), Applications that use Common Internet File System (CIFS) or Network File System (NFS) protocols can leverage the advantages of CAStor without application or business process modifications.

What is the best approach?  Connecting to Centera through APIs directly from Alfresco or using 3rd party products like above to mount?

Any suggestions?

[mrogers]

Lots of issues raised there.   

Normally the first port of call is to ensure that alfresco is always available.    So look at clustering and fail over to a hot or warm standby.   You will find various threads on these forums discussing how people do it from the simple to the wierd and wonderful.     There are many options (Alfresco is very customisable) and that's probably where your sys admins should be concentrating.

Yes there's a potential issue with needing to pull content from file server to serve it up via another protocol like NFS however the content store lends itself to caching very well.   There's also a caching content store in Alfresco Enterprise for use where the file server is expensive or slow.     There are also many third party filesystem tools which can cache, cluster and manage different volumes.

A production run with "hundreds of thousands of documents" which are accessed via NFS sounds like a slightly unusual requirement for alfresco.   Perhaps if you posted rough details of what you are trying to do there may be other options?   And you can read the content store "by the back door" if you don't care about things like security which a big batch job typically may not.  (Just don't update or delete content!)

[mrogers]

Also do you need to use NFS?   If your sys admins have concerns about needing to restart machines to remount NFS then just use another protocol such as HTTP.