Building Big Data Portal through Liferay and MongoDB integration

Author: Nathan Sandler

The CIGNEX Datamatics Big Data Portal is a web based solution which combines the powerful presentation capabilities of a portal such as rich user interfaces, collaboration, and secures access, with centralized & massively scalable data storage as the back end, consisting of a variety of content (Audio, Video, Images, Documents, Metadata) in large volume.

We have been providing content management and portal solutions for the past 12 years. While serving our customers we have observed the following:

  • The content is growing big, really big (volume)
  • The unstructured (variety of) content is now becoming a business need for customers to process
  • Customers wanting to capture smart information (meta-data) about the content
  • Need to provide high performance and secure access of content to variety of applications and devices

We have integrated two leading Open Source technologies, Liferay and MongoDB to build a powerful, cost effective solution as “BIG DATA PORTAL” to the ever growing need to manage the vast amount of information available. Big Data is at the foundation of many technologies that are trending today. With years of proven global experience in Open Source, we are excited to be pioneering solutions that solve many of today’s growing challenges.

CIGNEX Datamatics Big Data Portal is represented in the following diagram.

Liferay is the leading Open source portal with a strong community; with 4+ million downloads, with 500,000 deployments worldwide. Liferay is featured as Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals.

MongoDB is an immensely scalable, NoSQL and agile document-oriented database based on JSON-like document storage with dynamic schemas. MongoDB’s flexible data structure, ability to index & query and auto-sharding makes it a strong tool that adapts to changes and reduces the complexity. MongoDB’sGridFS enables large binary objects like Images, Video or Audio.

Big Data Portal with MongoDB and Liferay provides lower total cost of ownership and higher ROI to the businesses. CIGNEX Datamatics have developed a connector which enables Liferay to manage content in the clustered environment in the MongoDB solution. The architecture diagram is given below:

Key Benefits with our solution include:

  • Elimination of high end storage systems such as SAN and Oracle Clusters, which is a huge cost savings
  • Secure access to data
  • Flexibility leading to high performance
  • Simplified Data Management through a single system managing structured and unstructured data
  • Consistent look and feel accessible across myriad gadgets and devices

For more details, download the presentation from CIGNEX Datamatics website at, http://www.cignex.com/resources/presentations/psc