At Docuvela, we recently put our new migration platform, Veladocs.sync, through a real-world production migration: migrating 10.5 million documents from Documentum into the Veladocs repository for a Fortune 100 life sciences company. Our engineering team, well-versed in a variety of Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) platforms, including OpenMigrate, now rebranded as Hyland Migrate, found Veladocs.sync’s performance to be truly exceptional.

The results speak for themselves:

• 99.9997% success rate only 24 documents failed due to Documentum REST API limitations.
• 24×7 uptime with only 1 interruption, caused by a routine Documentum restart
• Enterprise-grade configuration via Apache Airflow to optimize migration throughput
• 95% reduction in manual intervention as compared to legacy tools
• 40% shorter end-to-end migration timeline as compared to similar migrations we’ve run in the past

So, what made this possible? There are six common pain points that all migrations experience. Veladocs.sync was built from the ground up using modern architecture to directly solve each one. Here’s how:

Pain Point 1: Data Wrangling

When companies work with large volumes of historical data, that data often starts out messy, inconsistent, or incomplete.  This is often the case for migrations. Data needs to be cleaned up, organized, and structured – a process called data wrangling. In a typical migration, data wrangling involves custom code, proprietary APIs, and manual intervention. Veladocs.sync greatly simplifies this effort by relying on Apache Airflow functionality to:

• Break work into manageable, repeatable, and consistent tasks
• Include support for custom business rules
• Integrate with common data preparation and manipulation platforms (Excel, Google Sheets, Salesforce)
• Provide a Python runtime to build and automate. Python is the de facto standard for data engineering, enabling faster extension and automation of solutions.
• Ensure transparency by providing user-friendly dashboards that track the status of data processing in real time.

Pain Point 2: Scheduling & Orchestration Activities

Veladocs.sync, like traditional migration tools, relies on breaking the migration into document batches. Batching documents during large migrations is crucial to optimize resource usage and improve error handling, especially when dealing with large volumes of data. By processing data in smaller, manageable groups, you can avoid overwhelming systems and ensure a smoother migration process.  

In legacy ECM migration tools, queueing, tracking, and monitoring batches is a very manual task that requires 24×7 monitoring. If new batches are not started immediately when existing batches complete or encounter an error, precious migration time is lost. Veladocs.sync leverages Apache Airflow’s powerful orchestration and workflow management functionality, allowing migrations to run end-to-end with no manual intervention. Key features of Apache Airflow that allow Veladocs.sync to streamline migration orchestration include:

• The ability to orchestrate over a group of many batches, ensuring that a single batch failure doesn’t prevent other batches from running successfully.
• The ability to create modular version-controlled migration procedures
• Task dependency, ensuring that tasks run only when their pre-requisites are complete
• Built-in retry logic, including timeouts to keep migration pipelines resilient
• Data visualization through a rich web user interface to track migration status, detailed audit logs, and retry attempts.

Pain Point 3: Processing Failures 

In any complex data or automation process, things will go wrong – maybe a database is down, a file isn’t where it’s expected, or an internet connection fails mid-transfer. One of Veladocs.sync’s biggest strengths is how well it manages these kinds of failures without needing constant oversight. This is all possible because Apache Airflow supports:

• Automatic Retries: Tasks are automatically retried if they fail, eliminating the need for manual restarts.
• Real-Time Alerts: Teams get notified via email or Slack if a task can’t be recovered.
• Pick Up Where You Left Off: Easily rerun or skip failed steps without restarting the whole process.
• Visual Dashboard: Color-coded views show exactly what failed and why.
• Smart Logic: Workflows can adapt when things go wrong to prevent further errors.
• Failed documents are automatically prepared for remediation.
• Distributed Architecture: A Modern Kubernetes-based environment provides a fault-tolerant and resilient application runtime

Pain Point 4: Manual intervention

Veladocs.sync minimizes manual intervention in ETL processing by leveraging a robust automation engine built on Apache Airflow. Once workflows are defined, Veladocs.sync intelligently orchestrates task execution, manages dependencies, retries failed steps according to predefined rules, and resumes processes from the point of failure – all without human input. This hands-off execution reduces the risk of human error, accelerates data delivery, and ensures consistent results across pipeline runs. By eliminating manual processing and troubleshooting, Veladocs.sync allows migration teams to focus on improving data quality, scaling operations, and delivering insights faster, making automation not just efficient, but a core driver of successful enterprise migrations. For example, in our most recent production migration, Veladocs.sync ran for multiple days without any manual intervention.

Pain Point 5: Gathering Metrics

Veladocs.sync offers deep visibility into every step of the ETL process through a rich set of built-in metrics – tracking task duration, success and failure rates, retries, queue times, and resource usage. These insights are critical for diagnosing performance bottlenecks, identifying recurring issues, and accurately predicting migration timelines. With detailed logs and execution timelines surfaced directly within the platform, teams can continuously refine their workflows, improving both reliability and throughput. Veladocs.sync also supports proactive alerting for faster incident response and reduced downtime. This high level of observability makes Veladocs.sync a scalable, predictable, and trustworthy solution for enterprise data migrations.

Pain Point 6: Precise Tuning

Veladocs.sync offers significantly greater tuning and scalability options than traditional ETL tools. Its orchestration engine allows engineers to fine-tune task parallelism, dynamically allocate cloud resources, and schedule workloads for optimal performance and cost-efficiency. With Veladocs.sync, teams can adjust key parameters, such as batch sizes, retry logic, priority levels, and execution windows, in real-time to maximize migration throughput. This flexibility empowers organizations to handle complex, large-scale migrations with precision. By enabling on-the-fly adjustments and real-time monitoring, Veladocs.sync ensures that every migration is efficient, resilient, and tailored to the unique demands of the data.

The Veladocs.sync Difference in Action

The migration of 10.5 million documents from Documentum into Veladocs was more than just a test. It was proof that Veladocs.sync is redefining what’s possible in enterprise content migration. By directly addressing the six most common pain points – data wrangling, scheduling, failure recovery, manual intervention, observability, and tuning – Veladocs.sync delivered a new standard of performance, automation, and control. Built on Apache Airflow but engineered with purpose-built content migration enhancements, Veladocs.sync empowers teams to complete high-volume migrations faster, more reliably, and with fewer resources.

If your organization is looking to modernize its content infrastructure with a scalable, resilient, and low-maintenance platform, reach out to learn more about Veladocs.sync.