In a previous article, we explained that many AEM Sites customers ignore the true power of Digital Asset Management (DAM) in their Web Content Management (WCM) systems.
Then we wrote some buzzwords about levercizing effectuated synergies in an article on Business Considerations of Retrofitting True DAM Functionality into Live AEM Sites Deployments.
But now for those of you who don’t think that “RAID levels” refer to pesticide strength, we offer a handful of technical considerations to keep in mind as you build out DAM functionality without 404-ing your website:
- DAM systems with significant manipulations of multimedia can be CPU intensive and may require additional cores or even additional servers
- Primary functions for DAM are typically behind the corporate firewall whereas a WCM’s hardware horsepower handles customer visits in the DMZ
- Storage needs for enterprise DAMs can easily require several Terabytes, especially if you have significant video assets
- Based on these greater storage requirements and higher rate of asset growth, DAM systems often implement an archiving solution much quicker than WCM deployments
- Uptime requirements might be very different for the DAM and the WCM sides of the business, so many organizations choose lower-cost options involving cold failover for the DAM infrastructure
Many of these differences lead to an obvious question: should these systems even be implemented on the same hardware? Freedom has had clients make both choices after weighing the following tradeoffs:
- Whether the benefits of two disconnected systems outweigh the complexities of synchronizing content across two repositories
- Calculating licensing costs associated with additional hardware versus prospective labor savings
- As a consideration for both the short-term launch and the long-term release cycles, whether the additional time needed to regression test existing functionality is acceptable
If you’d like to learn more, please contact us to learn more about Freedom’s DAM Healthcheck for AEM Sites Customers.