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A practical guide to understanding document management system requirements
Part 5: Optimizing Performance
Since the success of your document management system relies on your network infrastructure, next we’ll focus on some key areas for you to be aware of as you finalize your plans.
It’s important to make sure your network backbone isn’t the weak link that causes poor performance and consequently a bad user experience. By today’s standards, most deployments over a local area network environment perform well. Performance challenges tend to arise in extended Wide Area and Internet deployments. The factors that have the most impact in these environments are bandwidth, latency, and the way your document management system is optimized for both.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data that can travel over a communications path in a given amount of time. It’s measured in bits per second. A T1 line, for example, is 1.544 kilobits per second. Bandwidth is really all about measuring potential, not unlike the amount of electricity that can travel over a particular wire. When we talk about having a certain amount of bandwidth, like a T1, the common term refers to the maximum amount available. The tricky thing is that the maximum available bandwidth
can diminish rapidly. If there’s a lot of data being transferred over a fixed
amount of bandwidth, the available or effective bandwidth is reduced. Additionally, a T1 in one company may have consistent adequate bandwidth while a T1 in another company may have less effective available bandwidth, e.g., a company with 25 employees vs. a company with 100 employees. With an additional 75 employees using the available bandwidth, the effective bandwidth will be less.
Most IT departments today have a very good handle on available and effective bandwidth. Greater challenges exist when connectivity is required between the US or Europe and emerging countries. In this situation, available bandwidth can vary dramatically.
Latency
Latency, or the measured time between data transmission and arrival across a network, is the hidden performance killer on a WAN. You might have adequate bandwidth but very slow data access times because latency is high.
Latency is measured in milliseconds. On today’s LANs, the average access time between a workstation and the server is probably less than 1 millisecond. On a good performing WAN, it’s in the 25 to 40 millisecond range. Across the Internet, latency can be 100 milliseconds or more depending on the path the data signal takes.
Reducing Latency
When it comes to dealing with latency there are good tools that monitor a
network and help you define strategies to reduce the amount of lag time
between transmission and arrival of data across the wire. “Chatty” or verbose applications can increase general latency and therefore, can negatively affect other applications.
If you have an inadequate bandwidth situation, then you certainly can increase the bandwidth. For instance, if you have a T1 you can introduce a T3. In some, but not all situations, increasing bandwidth will also reduce latency. You might also try to reduce the number of “hops” between locations or compress the data footprint that is being transmitted. The wide area acceleration market in the IT field is booming today and there are some very good technologies to help increase performance over the wide area network by directly reducing latency.
Poor application response in a wide area deployment could also be due to the way your document management system processes information. It could be that your document management system is not optimized for communication across lower bandwidth or higher latency environments.
Multiple Remote Vaults
Another way to improve performance in your document management system is to use remote vaults. With this methodology, you put the documents in a vault where they are most commonly accessed so that you reduce the amount of information that gets transferred across the wire.
You can also replicate vaults. If you have teams of people around the country who require access to most of the documents or even specific projects you are tracking and managing, then it is possible to replicate them so that everyone has immediate access to the data and nobody has to pull large amounts of documents across the wide area network.
Many variables contribute to optimum performance. Depending on the scope, business goals, and mandates of your document management initiative, it pays to consider them in advance. For example, a client called me and shared that their business team required IT to make connectivity over the WAN between the US, Europe and China perform as if all users, regardless of their location, were accessing information over the LAN. Where challenges exist in your environment, solutions are available. Chances are good that should performance issues arise, your document management provider and/or your IT department can help.
This ends our whirlwind tour of the considerations for implementing a document management system. We’ve covered a lot of ground, including some high level concepts and some in the trenches details.
Parts 1 & 2 | Parts 3 & 4 | Part 5
