I don't make New Year's Resolutions, so I can be critical of an article like this, looking through the lenses of Domino glasses. So, it was with interest when I came across this article on the SearchCIO:MidMarket site:
"When we split off from AIG, we were in such a fast-growth initiative that we had no traditional failure situation for email," Harte said. "If email went down, it was down until either the backup tapes went up or it was repaired."
Harte said the company considered Exchange server clustering and redundant servers, but both options were too expensive for the midsized company.
"We had one hiccup on a server in the server room," Harte said. "We had some construction going on and we didn't have very good environmental controls. [The server] was covered in dust. We had to shift Exchange to a new piece of equipment. It wasn't too bad. It was down four or five hours. That's not too bad. But when you're dealing with the executives at our company, any outage is too much. That kind of really drove home what we really wanted to do. The money to do it got freed up pretty quickly after that."
In this event, what did the company do? They bought an "email continuity appliance" (I had no idea such things existed).
It is easy to poke at this from a Notes/Domino point-of-view. I immediately thought "clustering," and so did they.
Harte said the company considered Exchange server clustering and redundant servers, but both options were too expensive for the midsized company.
Ouch.
While they would have purchase another Domino server license, clustering is free, reliable, and can be setup to run on any platform, regardless of the home mail servers' Operating System. I can also understand the need to stay with Outlook. But you can have that on the front end, and back end the whole thing with Domino. Migrations? Yeah, there will be cost there; the cheapest being someone's time, the more expensive being time and a product. But you knew that.
I'm done now. Discuss.
Link: SearchCIOMidMarket: MS Exchange downtime barely a blip for midsized insurer
Technorati tag: MS Exchange Lotus Domino
Comment posted by Keith Brooks01/08/2008 05:03:19 PM
Homepage: http://www.vanessabrooks.com
Technically you are correct, there is no charge for Clustering per se.
But there is a charge for Domino Enterprise Server which is hefty, but still much cheaper than buying 2 fully equal machines just to load Exchange on.
And of course they could have easily moved the one exec's mailbox to another server and had him up and running within 15 minutes(including server update/replicating the NAB et al).
As usual, money resolves any issue.
What if you never have issues? Then you never get funding.
Thus in order to get budget you have to "impact" a few people sometimes. Or plan MAJOR budget requests with the attitude of "well why do you think you never hear about any issues? Because we budgeted for expansion or develeopment or upgrades or whatever"
Be proactive helps in many ways, being reactive will just get you fired.... eventually.
Comment posted by Ed Brill01/08/2008 05:28:40 PM
Homepage: http://www.edbrill.com
This is a point I often make in discussions about the competitive differences between Domino and Exchange.
There is NO MARKET in the Domino world for an "e-mail continuity appliance". In the Exchange world, there are two or three vendors that specialize in this.
Keith: Domino Enterprise Server is the vast majority of servers installed today. A lot of organizations deploy pairs of clustered servers to manage 100% availability or so (and load balancing) of their Domino environments.
Comment posted by Charles Robinson01/08/2008 07:40:12 PM
Homepage: http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com
This reads as a whitepaper for Teneros. I'm baffled how it would cost "hundreds of thousands" of dollars to do clustering and redundant servers for 600 Exchange users. I would love to know how their current servers are laid out. It's probably an old school style from Exchange 5.5 or 2000, with separate servers per department since those versions didn't support the higher storage limits of Exchange 2003 and 2007.
Also, Exchange 2007 includes Domino-style replication and clustering. The need for appliances such as this is going to decrease in the future. Reworking their servers to use newer features could have mitigated adding a front end appliance. Adding the appliance was an easier route, but ultimately it's not going to solve the problem.
Comment posted by Gregg Eldred01/08/2008 10:26:30 PM
Homepage: http://www.ns-tech.com/blog/geldred.nsf
I could have thrown in a comment about running on a "real" operating system, like OS/400, would mitigate some issues as well (sorry if I offended anyone with that comment).
@Keith, while the cost for an additional server license may be somewhat expensive, it is cheaper than an "e-mail continuity appliance."
Regardless of how this conversation goes, the fact remains, they were on Exchange, they will stay on Exchange, and no matter how logical an argument may be to switch, it wasn't up to a clear, rational evaluation of alternatives with a vendor's roadmap/features/functions. Instead of taking the divestiture as an opportunity to re-evaluate current platforms/software, it is simply easier to maintain the status quo.
I don't think anything, not even "free," would change that mindset.
Comment posted by Nathan T. Freeman01/09/2008 08:24:47 AM
Homepage: http://nathan.lotus911.com
"While they would have purchase another Domino server license..."
Wait... 600 users? They qualify for Express licensing, then. Express now includes clustering options. They wouldn't pay a dime for the servers, then. Just for the messaging CALs.
That's just sad.
Comment posted by Charles Robinson01/10/2008 09:28:40 PM
Homepage: http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com
Express includes clustering?! Since when?! Why wasn't this shouted from the rooftops?
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