The Future of Dalim Drive

Driving the future

As Print evolves, the software around it needs to evolve too - this is why we built Dalim Drive. Drive is our scalable micro-service powerhouse, built to process files at speed and scale.

When we look at the growing print markets like Web2Print, Variable data and on-demand - there are several challenges faced:

• Tight SLAs
• Poor File Quality (I've seen a PDF of a website be submitted to a customer!) 
• Unknown Volume

These issues are intertwined with each other - Customers submit bad files...which will either crash at the rip, or slow production down to a crawl. Which means tight SLAs are hard to meet, and because of the sheer volume during peak periods it is an uphill battle. 

So what can you do? Well you need software in your workflow to ensure that the file is Print Ready before it reaches the rip. There are of course many solutions out there for Preflighting and Normalising files, but the software will face the same challenge - processing a huge volume of poor quality files, and needing to do it quickly.

The bottleneck in this situation used to be the press, but press manufactures are now coming out with machines that are lightning fast - so the software has to keep up.

This is where Dalim Drive comes in - Drive was created in 2019 to remove the software bottleneck entirely. We have customers worldwide that rely on it processing 9+ MILLION PAGES daily to make sure that they won't have any issues at the rip, and any problem files (corrupted, missing fonts) won't make it any further in their production workflow. 

Dalim Drive was based on the architecture we were using at the time, but as the rest of our products continue to evolve, so does Drive.  

Drive 2.0

Drive has naturally evolved over the years, with many different features being added - such as support for cloud storage, specific development for Web2Print workflows and even Integration with our HighRes viewer. 

But the change we are talking about in this article is a complete overhaul of the architecture, how you integrate with it, and even how it works. Yet the concept remains the same, it is a lean mean file processing machine. 

For those of you who know me, you'll know that Drive is a passion of mine here at Dalim so it was important to me that we take full advantage of the new architecture of Fusion whilst keeping the benefits of the previous version. 

So what is this new version of Drive? Well, It's a Fusion workflow!

Below is a very simple example of Preflighting and Normalising. If the file passes the Preflight check it is output to a Print Ready location, else it continues on to be Normalised. If it fails to be Normalised (e.g. Missing Fonts) then the file is moved to a Quarantine area and a report is sent. Otherwise it gets Normalised and sent to the same Print Ready location!

Taking it for a Test Drive

Drag Race

You may be thinking - how's a workflow going to be as fast as Drive? I had the same thought, so I tested it with 10,000 very nasty 2 page files on a single m6a.4xLarge AWS instance:

The results speak for themselves - R&D developed a way to run a workflow in a Drive-like manner, you simply provide a path to a file and it will grab it and process it without ingesting it into the system. You can see a large amount of time is gained in the Preflighting Process, this is due a big improvement in how we process multipage PDFs and our Preflighting logic! 

So as you can see the fact Drive has become a Fusion workflow hasn't slowed it down - but what else do we gain? The big one is flexibility. 

Flexibility

Previously Drive was a bespoke product - if a Customer had a certain request then it'd have to be evaluated, quoted and developed. That was a lot of fun for me, but less fun for the Customer if they quickly needed a new feature. Now, anything that is possible in a workflow is possible in Drive - and of course that includes powerful features such as Custom scripts, API integrations and even Approval Steps! 

Diagnostics 

Drive was a black box, you gave it an input and you received an output. In the output you had processing information which could be pieced together to create a picture, but it required deep knowledge of how the system worked. 

In Drive2.0 you have detailed information about exactly what happened to each document at a step level thanks to the workflow manager! 

This can give you an overview of where each File is in its workflow, and how many Documents you have in the queue. 

You can then drill down and view each Files workflow - allowing you to see exactly what happened to a file and when.

When talking to potential Customers about Drive, we always ask about how many Documents they process during their busiest time to have a rough idea of the workload. I was shocked to hear that some of them don't know due to a lack of insights with their existing solutions! 

This isn't a problem with Drive, all processing information is logged into ElasticSearch, and Kibana can then be used to build detailed dashboards, dig into trends, and see an overview of your production. 

Communication 

This is another big change - and it will make my developer friends very happy. Drive requires some integration work, you need a way to feed it, and to receive the processing results. This used to be done using JMF and JDF, which is of course a great standard but telling that to a developer would get you some strange looks. 

Now, all communication is done using GraphQL - this simplifies any integration as any developer is going to be a lot more familiar with it, similarly Drive will now deliver its processing information back in a nicely formatted and customisable JSON response! 

Spec Sheet

The Future is Bright

For someone that loves Drive you can see why I would be excited for its future. These new changes have made it much easier to adopt, more powerful, more flexible and turned the black box into a glass box. 

Let's talk

⇒ Curious to see it in action? Reach out to our team and discover how it all works in a personalized demo.

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