Many of our Documentum clients are in the industry where Documentum grew up – life sciences. We are trying to hit as many of the life sciences presentations as possible to answer their questions on the Life Sciences solutions. Below is our first post on EMC’s new Migration Tool as it relates to Life Sciences – one of their major announcements during the Tuesday Documentum Keynote :
Monday @ 2:30 –An Assessment and Migration Strategy for the EMC Documentum Life Sciences Solution Suite
The Monday presentation focused on migrating to D2 and specifically referenced migrations from DCM. ECM IIG is not focused on building new features into DCM and will only be releasing bug fixes. D2 is their new platform (consistent with last year’s message). The message was that EMC’s Migration Appliance (EMA – pronounced Emma) should be used to simplify your migration into D2 from DCM, Webtop, etc. Below are the high-level points:
- This tool does not have a cost to it, but is a services offering.
- It is built using Spring and Spring Batch
- Performs migrations at the database layer so it runs very fast.
- Right now EMC is offering a 1 week migration analysis for free – obviously a push to get people to look at the tool.
- The tool contains the ability to move users, groups, roles and all associated content to an object. It has a report generator component.
- It uses a NoSQL database in the middle when transferring files.
- There is currently not a simulation mode.
- Audience also asked if it had a FirstDocs source adaptor. The response was that they were working on one, but it was not currently available.
Summary
We’ve definitely seen the demand for a migration tool. OpenMigrate is by far our most frequently downloaded open source tool. We have always said that migrations are a good thing to have consultants do when the migration is a one-time activity. I’m assuming this tool was developed because EMC needs to get people to move to the D2 platform, and that migration will not be easy since it involves a significant object model adjustment in addition to the typical code migration/rewrite, hardware and middle-ware updates. But many clients have on-going needs and would want the ability to run future (potentially regular) migrations by doing it themselves and not involving ECM consulting or any consulting each time a migration/bulk import needs to be executed. Also, there are multiple migration tools on the market – OpenMigrate, Bulldozer, etc. It will be interesting to see where EMC’s proprietary migration tool fits in.
Jorge Sapaj says
Hello,
Do you know if customers/partners can have access to the EMA tool without EMC Consulting Services?
Regards,
Jorge Sapaj
eryan says
It is our understanding that the EMA tool is only available with EMC consulting services.
Mike Pinter says
Dave/Ellen,
Just curious – with all the talk you heard about the change in the object model in v7.0, is any of it tied to the suggestion of year’s ago (I think EMC World 2010 or 2011) that EMC would introduce an object model stored a kind of “partial” record so that redundant or empty data wouldn’t take up as much room in the database? I was always worried about the sound of that. It seemed too much like a solution looking for a problem that had more risk than benefit. Do people really complain that their database is too big or takes too much time when we have technology such as clustered/RAC databases and 64-bit addressable RAM in the database server?
eryan says
Mike –
The changes in the object model that we heard discussed were for reasons of moving to D2, not for any database efficiency. I agree that I have not heard people complain about a database being too big.
Ellen