Oracle Optimized Solution for WebCenter Content …hosteddocs.ittoolbox.com/ser_us_en_wp_unifyecm.pdfOracle Optimized Solution for Oracle WebCenter Content on SPARC SuperCluster 1

An Oracle White Paper October 2011

Oracle Optimized Solution for WebCenter Content on SPARC SuperCluster Unify Enterprise Content Management

Contents Executive Overview ............................................................................ 1 Introduction ......................................................................................... 3 Understanding and Interpreting Data .................................................. 4 Coping with Too Much Content........................................................... 6 Taking Advantage of Unused and Underused Unstructured Content . 7 Securing Valuable Information............................................................ 7 Implementing the Content-Enabled Enterprise ................................... 9 Conclusion ........................................................................................ 10 For More Information ........................................................................ 10

Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle WebCenter Content on SPARC SuperCluster

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Executive Overview The world is full of unstructured content. Everywhere a company turns there are opportunities to learn, improve, and gain greater insight into the business landscape. While some content is identified and used readily, other content is harder to find and organize due to subtleties or complex patterns. Fragmentation in how a business deals with unstructured content significantly inhibits that organization’s ability to act as an effective competitive force in the market. A recognized leader in content management, Oracle® is uniquely positioned to help enterprises better organize and understand the vast amounts of unstructured content that helps a business run smoothly and gain a competitive edge.

Oracle’s enterprise content management software, Oracle WebCenter Content, enables enterprises to harness and unleash the meaning underlying unstructured business data. Providing a single content repository, Oracle WebCenter Content facilitates the organization and cross-line of information sharing utilized by the most successful companies. It centralizes information management and control, facilitates compliance and reporting, and simplifies content storage while enabling sharing and collaboration between information consumers.

Oracle is the only high technology company with all the software and hardware components to deliver an infrastructure that can transform and streamline businesses. From server and storage systems with intelligent automation, to industry acclaimed software that integrates throughout all business levels, Oracle uniquely understands how to help enterprises address the challenges of global communication and collaboration and achieve success.

Now, the Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle WebCenter Content on Oracle SPARC SuperCluster delivers an integrated platform for content management applications. Built on the success of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Middleware Machine, SPARC SuperCluster is an optimized platform for consolidating and strengthening the role of servicing unstructured content.


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Combining an industry-leading content management system with high-performance hardware and built-in redundancy, the solution:

• Showcases a validated end-to-end hardware and software architecture that is extensively tuned for performance and reliability, and is based on Oracle’s expert knowledge and experience on building content-centric systems.

• Delivers a running, fully tuned, and highly available content management solution in as little as 11 days from the SPARC SuperCluster rolling off the delivery truck.

• Reduces the risk of time-consuming integration and expensive deployment delay by eliminating the tuning, networking, and security configuration that often takes over a month to get right and deploy.

• Provides unparalled security, with all SPARC SuperCluster components separated by a high-performance networking fabric. In addition, security processing built into the hardware accelerates running a secure enterprise — at no added cost, no loss of I/O slots from add-in cards, no extra power consumption — and is enabled in minutes due to Oracle’s co-engineering experience making software work in lockstep with hardware.

• Delivers staggering performance with the ability to ingest over 270 million documents per day, and support extreme search performance at 4,100 concurrent database searches through the entire DB index within 70 milliseconds.

• Offers the highest performance at the lowest cost and least complexity. Hardware and software solutions from other vendors have not had the engineering attention paid to ensure the best possible match, cost two to three times more, and introduce greater complexity into licensing and interoperation than Oracle WebCenter Content running on the SPARC SuperCluster.


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Introduction One of the most persistent puzzles facing medium- and large-sized business is: “How do we know what we don’t know?” This question pierces the boardrooms and dreams of many executives, and is one of the most critical questions a responsible business manager can ask of themselves. Companies constantly try to harness the information that flows in and around the business, but are often frustrated by the complexity of the information under their control and the difficulty in asking the right questions to the right people, and enabling those people through technology to answer those questions fully. Therefore the problem is one of information sharing and collaboration enabling an enterprise to understand its own information lifecycles more fully and then be enabled to act quickly.

The Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle WebCenter Content on SPARC SuperCluster is a platform that can help modern businesses enable the transformative nature of newly understood content for business success. Oracle WebCenter Suite offers businesses virtually all aspects of social and collaborative management under one license. From the industry-leading WebCenter Portal software, to pervasive content management in Oracle WebCenter Content, Oracle WebCenter Suite provides the extensive functionality enterprises need to manage the flow of information. Today, customers use Oracle WebCenter Content for:

• Enterprise content management

• Digital asset management

• Imaging and process management

• Connection to Oracle enterprise applications, such as Oracle’s Siebel, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle’s PeopleSoft and more

SPARC SuperCluster provides a robust computing platform that accelerates Oracle WebCenter Content performance. With this platform, companies in every industry can enable communication and collaboration to gain better insight into the meaning lying dormant underneath their existing unstructured content. The Optimized Solutions program from Oracle details a complete methodology that leverages the full extent of Oracle’s expertise in systems and software tuning and deployment to offer a single unified platform running the fastest and most high available content enablement platform. This paper discusses the benefits of Oracle’s ability to co-engineer from the design stages the software and hardware to work together to reduce deployment times, provide the fastest platform possible at the lowest cost, and by extension, enable businesses to embrace collaboration and information sharing for overall benefit.


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Understanding and Interpreting Data Most of the data that exists in a business is not easy to obtain. This can result from hard limits such as server performance or the presence of physical documents that are not in digital form. In addition, the inability of business units to successfully communicate with one another can impede collaboration. For example, technological barriers such as incompatible file formats, or human factors such as perceived fears that information should not be shared due to the silo effect, can limit information sharing.

When the flow of information is slowed or stopped, questions arise. Some questions seeking such data are difficult to ask, yet are relatively easy to answer by simply scanning a database. While this easy data, such as customer names, stock quotes, or pricing information exists in abundance, getting the vast amounts of information needed to make a business decision takes time that must be spent wisely. Other data is even harder to interpret, especially when generated from educated guesses on how trends will develop in the future. What sorts of decisions are customers going to make a month from now? Where are the markets headed? What effects will business decisions made today have on the future of the company? Questions such as these are easy to ask but hard to answer due to the complexities of the questions and the multi-dimensional, interrelated aspects of the information being sought, often from widely ranging business units.

There is a vast spectrum of content and enterprise platforms must be able to understand the varied ways of dealing with information. Toward this end, Oracle created the Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle WebCenter Content on the SPARC SuperCluster. Understanding that enterprise software should not be left to languish on underperforming hardware, Oracle created a balanced system that delivers high performance and redundancy to deliver responsiveness and protect application investments, while enabling the sorts of cross-organizational discussions that lead to answering successfully the hardest business questions.

To address these challenges, Oracle combined Oracle WebCenter Content and high-performance servers incorporating SPARC T4 processors, terabytes of Oracle Exadata Database software and servers, and Oracle Exalogic Middleware software, in the SPARC SuperCluster to create the right platform for running content management workloads. Delivering world-record performance, Oracle’s SPARC T4 servers are based on a design ethic that incorporates pre-planned hardware design working in lockstep with software engineering to derive the highest customer value from the combined hardware and software stack. These servers are combined in the SPARC SuperCluster with extreme-performance Exadata database storage cells to partner the fastest database technology with the fastest server technology in a single, unified rack.


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Figure 1. The Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle WebCenter Content delivers high performance in an easy to deploy solution.

The Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle WebCenter Content addresses content management issues by delivering:

• Communication and collaboration at less cost. With the ability to unify lines of business and foster communication between previously siloed information, SPARC SuperCluster delivers easy content management deployment. Pre-tuned and pre-engineered performance is leveraged in a single platform that creates a central place for content to be stored, accessed, and understood across organizational lines in an enterprise. Typically only requiring a single content management software license, the solution simplifies licensing and reduces costs over systems from other vendors that require expensive and complex add-on licenses for common use cases.

• Security. Oracle’s unique in-processor support for cryptographic acceleration delivers seamless performance improvements to secured content management systems, without consuming extra power or I/O slots. This support exists as a synthesis between hardware acceleration and software support, allowing easy access to security features that reduce the risk of compliance-related penalties that can be assessed as a result of security breaches.

• High performance. The Oracle Optimized Solution for WebCenter Content is the highest performance content management solution ever produced by Oracle, with the ability to ingest over 3,100 documents per second for an estimate of over 265 million ingested documents per day. In addition, the solution enables enterprises to search through the full text of these documents to find business information at a rate of over 4,300 concurrent searches with an average of each search completing in only 70 milliseconds.


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• Simplified administration. Automated database management delivered through the Oracle Exadata storage software and hardware saves significant time over typical database administration efforts. In addition, whole-rack management — from the firmware on individual components to advanced software insights into performance — takes place in a single-pane management window in Oracle Enterprise Manager to save over 50 percent of ongoing administration time.

Coping with Too Much Content Businesses in every industry, including finance, telecommunications, retail, government and more, deal with a huge of amount of created content. Whether that content is large, such as medical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) files that can consume over 1 TB, or very small, such as cash register receipts, the need to store documents in a timely and organized fashion is universal. Any time wasted in the transmission or indexing of documents to an extensible storage location is time that could be spent performing analytics or responding to customer requests.

Creating large-scale, custom installations that can handle content ingestion requirements is complex and time-consuming for IT staff. The Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle WebCenter Content addresses these challenges by offering a self-contained content management system delivered through an integrated software and hardware solution. Integration and optimization enable the solution to deliver predictable performance, maintain high levels of availability, and significantly reduce deployment time.

Figure 2. The SPARC SuperCluster can act as the repository for an entire organization’s content requirements.


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Achieving high performance with a content management system requires thought to the overall system design. One use case details the need to place documents in a database as quickly as possible. In the past, this meant clustering systems or creating complex balancing software that mimicked the functionality of a high-performance document-processing server. In fact, the mainframes of yesteryear attempted to provide these capabilities. Today, some vendors position mainframe offerings as content management servers to make them relevant for modern computing. Yet mainframe transaction costs are too expensive in today’s high-volume document creation climate. The Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle WebCenter Content on SPARC SuperCluster fulfills this role with an integrated system that is tuned for high throughput and can be expanded to eight full racks for high-demand environments.

Taking Advantage of Unused and Underused Unstructured Content Simply collecting content is not enough. Once content is processed, it must be analyzed to provide value to the enterprise. Many businesses have a veritable treasure trove of information stored in databases and storage servers that will never be accessed, or perhaps used only for disaster recovery or retrieval for legal requirements. Giving business units structured access to this information can be a transformative process with surprisingly beneficial outcomes.

Oracle WebCenter Content is adept at taking that content and making it more useful. The software uses the high-speed SPARC SuperCluster to enable the content to be sorted, tagged, and organized to facilitate knowledge transfer and enable cross-organizational collaboration. For example, using the data and documents mentioned in the previous high-volume content ingestion example, the solution can deliver a full text search response from a database of 3.5 million documents from over 3,700 searches simultaneously in as little as 70 milliseconds. This extremely fast speed enables the system to act as the facilitation engine for the large-scale, high-performance analytics that successful enterprises use every day to stay ahead of competitors and provide the best customer service.

Search terms can be located in any document in any place throughout the content management system. Result sets can be passed to business analytics processes, billing and finance processing tools, or other enterprise applications that are responding to customer requests for information. How does this help a company succeed? Oracle WebCenter Content — and by extension Oracle WebCenter Suite, including WebCenter Portal, WebCenter Sites, and other document management and search functionality — is designed to interoperate with all of Oracle’s enterprise applications, and supports extremely advanced analytics and event-driven processing capabilities centered on content.

Securing Valuable Information Security issues often arise after the fact, with customer security teams and corporate compliance officers identifying breaches. In many environments, a fully secured infrastructure introduces significant performance penalties, leading organizations to omit security entirely or forego security measures on specific aspects of a platform. Oracle servers incorporating SPARC T4 processors take security to a new level. High-performance security is designed directly into the processor, enabling Oracle WebCenter Content applications to take advantage of on-chip cryptography to simplify and speed security operations.


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Considering the time it takes to design, test, and produce a modern microprocessor, Oracle chose to include security features in the processor silicon. This required Oracle to anticipate future business challenges and design the processor with them in mind, essentially attempting to read the future needs of customers at the beginning of the long processor design cycle. Oracle’s belief that fast encryption would be a top priority in the information age proved correct. As a result, significant amounts of silicon are devoted to enhancing performance at the cryptographic level in the SPARC SuperCluster.

Figure 3. Oracle’s SPARC T4 processor includes cryptographic capabilities.

The failure to run a security-compliant data flow can have serious legal and financial repercussions, yet these risks often are ignored by some departments to gain performance and agility. The SPARC SuperCluster removes these barriers, delivering high-performance and secured operations at high speed. Dedicated hardware accelerates cryptographic ciphers, including Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Data Encryption Standard (DES), Camellia, CRC32c, KASUMI, MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm, mpmul, MonMul, MONTSQR, and secure hash algorithms (SHA-1, SHA-256, and SHA-512). As a result, the Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle WebCenter Content on the SPARC SuperCluster enables full Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption with little performance penalty, while offering high levels of security to content management workloads.

• Low overhead. Full SSL encryption lowers performance by only a fraction, significantly less than the performance degradation experienced with other software-based approaches.

• Built-in security. Security acceleration at the processor level eliminates the need for add-on cards that consume server slots and power.


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• Fast, transparent implementation. Configuring applications to take advantage of on-chip cryptography takes minutes and is transparent to applications, saving hours of administration and testing time.

• Safe and Secure. Customer information is secured by cryptographic acceleration functions to limit exposure and reduce the likelihood of expensive lawsuits.

Implementing the Content-Enabled Enterprise Traditionally, deploying a content management infrastructure requires a great deal of pre-planning and consultation in order to maximize performance and get the best result. For example, many enterprise applications can benefit from the availability of content management solutions. Indeed, content management solutions tend to be partnered with a wide variety of different applications.

• Oracle’s Siebel CRM. Content management solutions can provide the documents to process management for Siebel workflows, as well as capture the documents and data created with Siebel analytics, turning them into living resources to gain business insight.

• Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise applications. Content management solutions can help companies save time and money by moving to a more paperless business using document imaging and process automation through intelligent computer-aided scanning, and analysis of paper documents.

• Oracle E-Business Suite. Financial applications can use Oracle WebCenter Content to automate Accounts Payable, saving invoice processing time and improving the flow of money into and out of the business.

• Oracle WebCenter Portal. Seamless integration between Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content enables large volumes of unstructured content to be aggregated and displayed through a central portal for employees, customers, and partners.

• Other solutions. Oracle WebCenter Content can act as the main repository for smaller content management tasks that are performed throughout an enterprise, or those that rely on small, localized proxy servers from remote offices.

One of the main business reasons that Oracle WebCenter Suite and by extension Oracle WebCenter Content have achieved such success is the pervasive nature of the software’s reach. The software is designed to handle the needs of different business units, and serves as a scalable aggregation point for many business functions — from finance and accounting, to human resources, billing, customer support and more — while offering scalability from single servers to as many as eight SPARC SuperCluster racks.

When paired with the SPARC SuperCluster hardware platform, Oracle WebCenter Content can be deployed quickly on known and tested hardware configurations. Unlike solutions from other vendors that can encounter problems that push deployment times from weeks to months, Oracle’s solution can be implemented in a matter of days. While users can choose to handle installation tasks, rapid installation of Oracle WebCenter Content can be performed by Oracle consulting, enabling organizations to get a fully running and certified content management system online in a fraction of the time.


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Conclusion While unstructured content is generated on a continuous basis by business applications, rarely is it stored in an infrastructure that allows that information to be shared easily or utilized fully. In part, this is due to the notion of content management being difficult to conceptualize through a technical or human lens. Oracle WebCenter Content on the SPARC SuperCluster addresses those challenges by offering a rapidly deployed, high-performance platform that enables organizational collaboration and cooperation based on a solid information management technology platform.

At the most basic level, the Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle WebCenter Content reaches through an organization to consolidate disparate information in a central repository, and improve automation and process flow. Once collected, data has more power. A wide range of analytical functions can be performed, providing actionable insight into internal or customer business patterns. As a result, the problems faced by multiple business units can be synthesized into a cohesive, easy to understand question, with the platform offering ways to solve those problems and questions efficiently.

Efficiency is generated from the very benefits that Oracle envisioned when co-engineering industry-leading software and hardware design. By integrating the solution, and opening new avenues of insight into business challenges, Oracle continues its commitment to bringing customer value through facilitation at all levels of business operations. Toward this end, the Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle WebCenter Content on SPARC SuperCluster unleashes the business benefits of unstructured data to drive business success with newfound information value.

For More Information Information on the products and technologies discussed in this paper can be found in Table 1.

TABLE 1 SOURCES FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

TOPIC URL

Oracle Servers http://www.oracle.com/servers

Oracle WebCenter Suite http://www.oracle.com/webcenter

Oracle Optimized Solutions http://www.oracle.com/goto/optimizedsolutions

Oracle Optimized Solution

for WebCenter Content on

Oracle SPARC SuperCluster

http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/solutions-webcenter-content-496763.html

Oracle Optimized Solution for WebCenter Content on SPARC SuperCluster October 2011 Author: Nick Kloski

Oracle Corporation World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA 94065 U.S.A.

Worldwide Inquiries: Phone: +1.650.506.7000 Fax: +1.650.506.7200

oracle.com

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