Cataldo Mega

Towards the Design of a Scalable Email Archiving and Discovery Solution

In this paper we propose a novel approach to specialize a general purpose Enterprise Content Management (ECM) System into an Email Archiving and Discovery (EAD) System. The magnitude and range of compliance risks associated with the management of EAD is driving investment in the development of more effective and efficient approaches to support regulatory compliance, legal discovery and content life-cycle needs. Companies must recognize and address requirements like legal compliance, electronic discovery, and document retention management. What is needed today are EAD systems capable to process very high message ingest rates, support distributed full text indexing, and allow forensic search such to support litigation cases. All this must be provided at lowest cost with respect to archive management and administration. In our approach we introduce a virtualized ECM repository interface where the key content repository components are wrapped into a set of tightly coupled Grid service entities, such to achieve scale-out on a cluster of commodity blade hardware that is automatically configured and dynamically provisioned. By doing so we believe, we can leverage the strength of Relational Database Management Systems and Full Text Indexes in a managed clustered environment with minimal operational overhead.

Dynamic Provisioning of System Topologies in the Cloud

Today’s IT infrastructures of companies are dimensioned to cover highly diverse workloads. In particular, it must be guaranteed that peak workloads can be processed according to concerted Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Consequently, companies have to cope with high acquisition costs of IT resources such as machines and software including costs for their maintainance and operation to meet these requirements. Thereby, achieving a high utilization of the available resources during most of the time is not possible. Based on these facts, companies endeavor to outsource their IT infrastructure to IT service providers, which in turn intend to offer respectively tailored and on-demand usable IT services using cloud computing paradigms. Obviously, the IT service providers are anxious to minimize the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their operating environments. Therefore, their goal is to minimize the amount of the provisioned IT resources by meeting tenant-specific SLAs and to maximize the utilization of the hosted IT resources by sharing them among multiple tenants (multi-tenancy). This paper presents a dynamic and cost-efficient provisioning approach of multi-tenant capable system topologies based on a Monitor-Analyze-Plan-Execute (MAPE) loop concept. For workload estimation and derivation of a capable resource topology, the MAPE loop is executed regularly regarding specified time intervals, which forms a proactive dynamic provisioning approach. Thereby, the proposed provisioning techniques apply heuristics which already encapsulate concrete performance information instead of using complex performance model solutions. Finally, a topology calculation model is developed which is the base for the proposed dynamic provisioning approach. This model enables provisioning capabilities supporting customer demands, cost-efficient utilization of resource instances, and sharing of resources by multiple tenants.

Email Archiving and Discovery as a Service

Corporate governance and legislative regulations are forcing companies to extend their IT infrastructure by Email Archive and Discovery (EAD) systems for compliance reasons. Praxis shows that every installation is different from another; not only in terms of the execution infrastructure, but also in terms of e.g. document and archiving procedures that map a company’s own business rules. As a consequence, EAD systems have to be highly customizable to their intended usages.

Dynamic cloud service topology adaption for minimizing resources while meeting performance goals

Even in the cloud computing era, meeting service-level agreements (SLAs) of a computing service or application while significantly reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) remains a challenge. Cloud and software defined environments (SDEs) are offering new opportunities for how resources can be utilized to an even higher degree than before--which leads to a reduced TCO for service providers and customers of a service. The traditional method of meeting an SLA is to assess peak workloads and size a system accordingly. This still leads to very low average compute resource utilization rates. This paper presents a novel dynamic and cost-efficient orchestration approach of multitenant capable, software defined system topologies based on a monitor-analyze-plan-execute (MAPE) concept. We present the mechanism involved in creating and applying these heuristics and show the results for a cloud-based enterprise content management (ECM) solution. Our approach allows the cloud provider to minimize its resource requirements while staying in compliance with SLAs.

Content-Management-Systeme der nächsten Generation

Der Traum vom „papierlosen Buro“ ist bereits mehr als 30 Jahre alt. Die Idee, durch die Einfuhrung von Computern Papierberge in den Buros abzubauen, wurde schon in den siebziger Jahren geboren. Das Ziel, alles Papier zu verbannen, ist jedoch noch immer in weiter Ferne. So verdoppelt sich die Anzahl der Papier-Dokumente in Firmen alle zwei Jahre. Daneben sorgt die Durchdringung der IT im privaten und insbesondere im geschaftlichen Bereich fur eine immense und rapide, zunehmende Datenflut. Content-Management-Systeme (CMS) sollen sowohl beim Abbau der Papierberge, als auch beim Umgang mit den Daten helfen. Jedoch ist es schwer mit den rasch steigenden Anforderungen, vor allem hinsichtlich der Datenmasse, mit moderaten Kosten Schritt zu halten.