Business Continunity

EMC Documentum products have been designed with true business continuity in mind. Business continuity entails making data and system operations available even when operator errors, system failures, accidents, or disasters occur.

Running mission-critical content applications poses high demands on enterprises for the availability of the underlying content infrastructure. Increasingly, as companies in many industries develop their content applications into systems of records, their solutions require business continuity.

EMC Documentum architecture

Used for some of the most demanding content applications worldwide, EMC Documentum architecture enables organizations to reduce and eliminate the impact of any interruption in system availability no matter what the cause. Even more importantly, EMC Documentum architecture enables you to deploy solutions that can prevent any loss of system availability.

Levels of system availability

The EMC Documentum business continuity approach offers various levels to allow enterprises to choose between the degree of system availability they require and the investment they are willing to make for it. The lowest level, mandatory for everyone, enables organizations to conduct regular backups and recovery of data. Since EMC Documentum products leverage standards-based platforms such as UNIX and Microsoft Windows file systems as well as RDBMS databases, organizations can take advantage of any backup tools available for their respective file systems and databases.

The next level of system availability provides companies with the ability to establish a redundant system that serves as a "silent mirror" of the actual primary operational system. In case of failure, the redundant system can take over the entire operation of the primary system. Operating a redundant system implies additional cost, but with the benefit that the redundant architecture can take over system operations within a few minutes or even seconds. This eliminates any significant lapses in system availability caused by potential incidents.

The highest level of system availability that the EMC Documentum architecture provides is the high-availability option enabled by clustering. With the EMC Documentum platform, organizations can cluster every component of the EMC Documentum architecture.

Clustering capabilities

Because it relies on standard file systems and databases, the EMC Documentum repository can leverage the clustering capabilities provided by underlying operating systems and databases. Enterprises can fully cluster EMC Documentum Content Server as well as the delivery and presentation logic that leverages the standards-based application server architecture.

As a result, organizations can build completely clustered high-availability systems with every component of the EMC Documentum architecture running in a cluster. While the cost and complexity of clustered systems can be significantly higher than more simple architectures, systems running in a cluster take advantage of the highest level of availability as well as higher performance resulting from load balancing.

Whichever level of system availability and implicit level of investment best fits your organization's needs, you can achieve true business continuity with EMC Documentum products.