InterSystems IRIS Data Platform Enables Massive Horizontal Scalability
CUSTOMER: LIB-IT DMS
CHALLENGE: Future-proof an application to meet anticipated scalability needs.
OUTCOME: LIB-IT DMS migrated their FILERO® enterprise information management system to InterSystems IRIS. Initial work to take advantage of sharding indicates that FILERO will be able to handle terabytes, and even petabytes, of data.
LIB-IT DMS GmbH is a German software provider that develops and sells FILERO®, a web-based enterprise information management system. FILERO offers a range of business functions such as file management, document versioning, archiving, email management, data management, knowledge management, and content integration.
“One hot topic in document management is regulatory compliance,” says Dagmar Causley, CEO of LIB-IT DMS. “Companies are required to keep and track every version of every document, every email, every blog — and they have to be able to search through this huge mass of information to find relevant and related items.”
Sharding Enables Massive Scalability
“Fortunately,” Causley continues, “just as we were coming to grips with our future scalability needs, InterSystems introduced InterSystems IRIS Data Platform™.” InterSystems IRIS includes a capability known as “sharding” that can greatly increase horizontal scalability. Large tables are partitioned among multiple servers, called shards, allowing queries to be run in parallel. The process of splitting queries and aggregating the results happens transparently to the application.
Migration in Mere Hours
LIB-IT DMS is a longtime InterSystems customer and has historically been careful to base FILERO on the latest version of InterSystems Caché®. They were able to migrate to InterSystems IRIS in just a couple of hours — without any compilation errors. “It helped that we started with clean, up-to-date code,” Causley says, “but I was happy with how smoothly the process went. I told InterSystems that, in my opinion, ‘IRIS’ stands for It Really Is Simple.”
In tests using the new sharding capability, FILERO was able to import and index 520 million records in under 7 hours.
Initial Results are Promising
LIB-IT DMS has begun rolling out the latest version of FILERO to its largest customer, a major German logistics company. Causley reports, “Already, the volume of data stored and accessed by FILERO is growing at a rate of 2.5 Terabytes/year. By the time we are done, the rate of increase will be 800 Terabytes/year. That’s an enormous amount of data but we are confident FILERO can handle it.”
Development Continues
Scalability isn’t the only thing LIB-IT DMS gains by upgrading to InterSystems IRIS. “We plan to leverage the IRIS intelligent interoperability features to design our own workflows instead of relying on third-party software,” says Causley. “And we will be looking at how the platform’s Natural Language Processing can help us improve our search functionality in text documents.”
“In short,” she concludes, “InterSystems IRIS will enable us to future-proof FILERO and grow our business.”
