Barrick Gold uses Replicator to Help Streamline Information Flow

Barrick Gold holds interests in the producing gold mines, which are concentrated in North America, South America, and Australia Pacific; producing copper mines located in Chile and Zambia and a mine under construction is located in Saudi Arabia. In addition, it holds interests in oil and gas properties located in Canada. Meeting the data needs of a distributed environment like this is a prime example of why Syntergy developed the Replicator product.  In this article we take a look at the challenges facing Barrick Gold with their Content Server implementation and how Replicator is a big part of the solution.

Barrick is using a distributed model in their implementation of Content Server.  They have eight primary Content Server instances in different countries.  There are approximately 2,000 users. 

“Our new projects, operating sites and regional offices are located all over the world and often in remote locations, so we could not implement one central Content Server with remote cache servers in the different locations,” says Tony Santillan, a Project Manager in the Information Management and Technology group for Barrick. “Performance is a challenge at our remote locations. Open Text recommended that we implement a distributed model, which meant we would put a Content Server instance in all of our major regions.”

As is often the case with large distributed organizations Barrick business units had a desire to share common information including policies, procedures, and templates that are stored on the different regional instances of Content Server. Syntergy’s Replicator product was the perfect solution.  Replicator has the ability to provide full multi-directional replication capability to replicate and synchronize key areas of Barrick’s file plan within regional instances.  Content Server objects are replicated to one or more participating systems. Any modifications to any of those replicas are reflected back to every other replica as well as the original object. All sites in production are updated automatically using a proprietary technology that enables transmission of data over low bandwidth networks.

“We can specify which instance we want a folder or a document to replicate to. This allows users to share information from one Content Server environment to another so they don’t have to log into an environment that may be far away geographically or have poor connectivity,” said Santillan.  Every organization needs quick access to content the users require. Replicator reflects the way people work, the way organizations function, and the way they allocate infrastructure resources in the most intelligent and cost effective manner. Groups within organizations have different needs for content and Replicator provides greater performance by storing documents locally for those who need them.

Because of the success of Replicator at organizations like Barrick Gold, Syntergy and OpenText recently produced a joint webinar that invited customers to learn more about replication and the Replicator product.  This webinar was extremely well attended and the feedback was very positive.  (Click here to view this webinar.)

Syntergy has recently seen quite a large interest in the Replicator product.  To see if it is a good fit for your organization we encourage you to contact Syntergy at info@syntergy.com or visit our website at https://www.syntergy.com.