Ken Gartner, reporting from the monthly NE Lotus User Group meeting. (Caution technical lingo ahead.)

Last night was the September meeting of the NE Lotus User Group in Waltham, MA.  A good turnout overall with a nice mixture of Domino customers, partners and IBM’ers.  The technical presentation was about DAOS as it appears in Domino 8.5 and the big improvements now in Domino 8.5.1.   Not only was the subject matter well-received by the audience generally — who doesn’t like to save more than 40% on their storage and backup costs? — but being able to discuss technical aspects was especially nice for us.  We had a lot to contribute, based on our own experience with large enterprise customers.

Pat Mancuso and Collin Murray ably handled the technical side of the discussion.  We asked some tough questions of our hosts — so much so that I did not have the heart to rise to the ‘Stump the Experts’ challenge  offered at the end of every meeting.  Overall, I was reassured that the implementation seems very solid, based on simplicity and information hiding.  What was especially neat was that in Domino 8.5.1 the email pathway from the client through the servers will be able to inquire whether an attachment needs to be copied across the wire during mail transfer and if DAOS already has it just a ticket stub is copied.  A big performance win for the network.  This is a bit of change from the traditional store-and-forward mail contract which generally is ‘pushed’ without asking questions about the data along the way.  One sticking point for us is that there are now two sizes floating around — the logical size of the message and the size of the actual network transfer — and it appears that the LOG.NSF transfer records are now going to include the actual number of bytes transferred, making correlation with actual mail documents harder since those are only expressed in logical size.  Grrrr.

Pat touted the ‘transparency’ of DAOS — the expansion of attachment tickets happens at such a low level that no API calls need to change.  We applaud this backward compatibility from IBM — at least one other large vendor I can think of might have asked us to rip-and-replace our code.  However, it is not the ‘transparency’ but rather the ‘opaqueness’ that mars this excellent feature in our eyes.  Permessa has been asking for more than one year to have additional APIs to provide access to both the physical as well as logical sizes.  Both pieces of information are vital for our customers’ planning and measurement needs.  Imagine performing a server consolidation where you are dealing with ‘logical’ disk space taken by mailboxes and not the ‘physical’ disk space once DAOS is taken into account!  Yuval Shimoni, our CTO, summed it up nicely.  To paraphrase:  the current DAOS is geared more to the tactical than the strategic needs of the IT staff.  To better help IT measure, model and plan their future environment we need access to the true size information.  The Domino Admin client uses undocumented calls to gather this information — we are just asking for this same info to be available via public APIs and would be happy to contribute effort to their design.  While I am asking, how about exposing the logical checksum value of each attachment — I can see possible optimizations from the A/V vendors to avoid redundant checks and free up CPU, giving DAOS an even higher effective performance boost.

Overall it was a great presentation.  I very much appreciated IBM answering our of myriad questions and taking notes on the issues we raised.  I actually look forward to attending these gatherings every month, as the positive energy and momentum from IBM is inspiring.

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