Technology never stands still.
The highest storage capacities available for servers in the year 2000 are now common on consumer-level PCs today. Video files have grown vastly in size as high-definition formats have become popular. Complex (and very large) 3D visual files are becoming part of business-as-usual in the manufacturing, technology, defense, fashion, and entertainment sectors.
But according to our customers, legacy digital asset management (DAM) technologies aren’t keeping up with the pace of change. Slowdowns during volume spikes when the DAM system is needed most, problems with adapting to new file formats, and laggy previews of high-definition image and video files have become the norm at too many enterprises.
At Nuxeo, it’s our goal to never slow a customer down. That’s why we decided to put the Nuxeo Platform to the ultimate stress test — to prove that our unique, modern content services architecture is the best way to achieve future-proof scalability in 2019 and beyond.
Why One Billion Digital Assets?
For one of the world’s biggest enterprise giants, scalability was key. To illustrate Nuxeo’s limitless capabilities, we chose a number of assets that would far exceed the number needed for typical DAM solutions, even those used by enterprise category leaders.
With many of the world’s largest enterprises currently using DAM systems that contain less than ten million assets, one billion seemed like a good place to start — at least one hundred times more than what most of our customers need at this time.
We also know, from extensive discussions with customers, that the most robust of today’s legacy DAM products start to encounter performance trouble in the 10-20 million asset range. By the time 20 million assets are stored in a digital asset management solution or platform, search times often spike to 10+ seconds, with even longer lags during times of high search volume.
The Nuxeo Digital Asset Set
To illustrate Nuxeo’s scalability, we tested two different DAM systems. Both contained assets with a diverse mix of file sizes and formats, designed to imitate a content mix at a large, global enterprise.
The difference between DAMs was in their number of assets. One DAM system ingested 500 million, while the other ingested 1 billion assets (of up to 22 GB in size).
The benchmark tests used a figure of 100-600 concurrent users, each transferring files of up to 500 GB, and also included testing of upload and download speeds for massive, 1 TB files to better gauge Nuxeo’s performance with file sizes of the future.
What We Tested
A truly unlimited enterprise digital asset management solution needs across-the-board performance at scale - for all the types of tasks that users might engage in.
For our billion-asset stress test, that meant first taking a look at ingestion speed. Ingesting and indexing a large quantity of new assets into a legacy DAM tool can create delays, sometimes for several days. Ingestion of a full billion assets was conducted to test overall speed.
We also took a close look at download speed, including downloads from large numbers of concurrent users and downloads of massive files.
Simply storing assets at scale isn’t enough — they must stay accessible and searchable at scale. That’s why we dug deep into the search speed offered by the Nuxeo Platform, testing the limits with 500 million and 1 billion assets.
Because high DAM usage can come at pivotal moments for organizations, we conducted additional tests based on volume spikes. For example, a sports network covering the Olympics might receive a veritable bombardment of photo and video files during live event coverage — right when delays could have the biggest negative impact on customer experience.
Both upload and download speeds were tested at times of high load, including transfers of super-large (500 GB) assets.
A Billion Is Just the Beginning
We’re proud of our tests — and of having the only enterprise DAM platform in the world to achieve the billion-asset test threshold.
But we also know from experience and history that for truly future-proof software, there’s no such thing as pausing at “good enough” … or even “good enough to blow our competition out of the water.”
As our performance test shows, we haven’t begun to approach the boundaries of what Nuxeo can do. Stay tuned for more explorations of Nuxeo’s scalability in future blogs.
The bottom line: A billion-asset DAM is a landmark achievement, but Nuxeo’s limitlessly scalable architecture means that we don’t have to stop here — and we’re not going to.
Curious about specific benchmark performance? Check out Scalability by Nuxeo to learn why we’re serious when we say we’re the only future-proof DAM in the industry, or check out our publically available Benchmarks.