The transition is well under way and is led naturally by smaller organizations, but larger enterprises are following.  The decision to move email into the cloud is mainly based on the promise of 50% savings.

Gartner analysts Matt Cain and James Lundy presented a number of charts intended to help with the decision process.

Comparison of On Premise vs. Cloud Email

Decision Criteria for On Premise vs. Cloud Email

Even if you decide to move email into the cloud, there are many vendors to choose from including the very big ones such as Google, IBM, Microsoft and Cisco. Some of the larger enterprises will need to consider hybrid models to deal with app integration and compliance issues and only host some of their workforce off premises. Yet another reason to carefully evaluate the trade-offs and cloud vendor of choice before proceeding.

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“MySpace said the solid state storage uses less than 1% of the power and cooling costs that their previous hard drive-based server infrastructure had and that they were able to remove all of their server racks because the ioDrives are embedded directly into even its smallest servers.”

The cards currently come in 160GB, 320GB and 640GB capacities and a 1.28TB card is expected later this year.

In recent years the trend for email servers has been to consolidate and centralize. A massive n-way server or cluster is often hosting tens-of-thousands of user mailboxes using massive and expensive NAS storage arrays. Some of our customers are already rethinking this approach by taking lessons from the cloud.

The concept is to set up mesh-clusters with many server nodes (blades) that all have their own inexpensive high-speed storage. Data redundancy is now accomplished at the server node, not just the storage level. Defective nodes can easily be removed / replaced entirely without decreasing storage performance caused by rebuilding a storage array.  There are still issues to be worked out on the platform level and with the management of mesh-clusters, but storage separation through technology like Lotus DAOS and the rapid advances in flash drive technology may bring this to mail servers very soon.

I have been using a SSD drive in my laptop for over 6 months now. The overall performance increase and the extended battery life is significant. I would not want to go back.

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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.

For folks who want to be on the mailing list for the NE Lotus User Group, you can sign-up here.

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Apropos green initiatives: Michael Osterman wrote a blog post last week with some surprising findings. He questioned respondents in his most recent survey whether “green” computing was a criterion in their decision-making process for new messaging server purchases.

The answer was “not much impact at all”:  53% of organizations said that green computing would play little or no role in their purchase decisions; only 2% told us that it would be a critical part of the decision-making process.

That is remarkable, since many companies are investing heavily in server consolidation and virtualization, which often significantly reduces their overall power consumption. According to Osterman, servers consume about 1.2% of the total power output in the US alone.

Perhaps it proves the point that market forces are still the best drivers for environmental progress. Just as SUVs became less popular with rising fuel costs, the push for greener data centers is largely driven by the need to improve a company’s bottom line through savings on power and cooling.

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The State Departments responded by announcing “unspecified disciplinary actions” to employees who keep using reply-to-all, and they delivered this news via old-fashioned cable.

“Department staff hitting ‘reply to all’ on an e-mail with a large distribution list is causing an e-mail storm on the department’s OpenNet e-mail system,” says the unclassified cable that was sent Thursday by Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy.
He said the result was ‘effectively a denial of service as e-mail queues, especially between posts, back up while processing the extra volume of e-mails.

The cable orders employees to ‘take immediate action’ to ensure they and their colleagues are ‘aware of the negative impact’ of hitting ‘reply all’ and to delete e-mails addressed to large numbers of people that they might receive in error.

Anyone who disregards these instructions will be subject to disciplinary actions, Kennedy wrote in the cable, which begins:  Please ensure widest distribution of this message. Some also compounded the problem by trying to recall their initial replies, generating yet another round of messages.”

I am still amazed how little control many companies and government agencies assert over their critical communication infrastructure.  Distribution lists, reply-to-all, mail forwarding, restricted content, etc. should all be governed by administrative rules that protect the company from serious technical and legal consequences.

The technology certainly exists…

Technorati Tags: reply-to-all, email security, us state department

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I think, this signals two things:

1. IBM acknowledges the growing popularity of the Mac, and its increasing usage worldwide. Macworld in particular is a great venue to connect with real end-users, many of which may not even know that Notes still exists. The success of MS-Exchange has been largely driven by the ubiquitous nature of Outlook, and IBM must rebuild end-user awareness and street-cred to regain market share.
2. Lotus is hoping to leverage years of heavy investment in Eclipse, which gives Notes instant cross-platform capabilities and feature parity on non-Wintel systems, including the Mac and of course Linux.

While there has been much focus on the long-overdue client-side improvements, since the release of version 8, Notes/Domino 8.5 is now bringing significant enhancements to the server.  Domino Attached Object Storage (DAOS) is a welcome feature that helps enterprises cope with rapidly growing storage demands and the rising costs for email storage. DAOS stores only one attachment per server, regardless of how many recipients received a copy of the message.

The chart below shows the projected storage savings with DAOS deployed. The report was produced on actual email traffic data and is representative of the savings that one can expect to see in large environments.

Technorati Tags: macworld, lotusphere, Notes 8.5, ND8.5, DAOS

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Last week’s outage at Google, recent repeat problems at Amazon’s S3 storage services and Apple’s “insanely grating” MobileMe launch highlight the need to carefully consider all aspects when weighing hosted vs. on-premise solutions.

Cost reduction is typically a key motivator, especially for smaller and non-tech companies, when eying a utility or SaaS model for email.  Jason Brooks at eWeek Labs wrote an article last week that lists five key issues to consider when evaluating a hosted email service.  Jason’s list was a good start, but missed a few key issues – specifically around security and compliance. Here’s my extended version:

1. Control – Outsourcing email may significantly limit the control over data and users. Many companies have extensive regulatory requirements such as content control, data leakage protection (DLP), Chinese walls / ethical firewalls and content archiving, that are not yet addressed by hosted solutions.
   -> Don’t forget to check your company’s specific requirements.
2. Security – Email has become the primary communication medium for business. Corporate messaging systems host a wealth of proprietary and confidential information, which typically doesn’t leave the corporate network. Hosted services will have to provide extensive encryption, data access security and audit capabilities before enterprise customers will even consider moving this data outside their corporate firewall.
   -> Make sure all your corporate legal, risk management, and compliance needs are satisfied by the services offered.
3. Performance – Moving user’s mailboxes into the cloud typically means drastically increased WAN traffic. Many companies have learned this the hard way while consolidating mail servers behind the firewall. A bandwidth upgrade to the Internet pipe is most likely a requirement to guarantee reasonable response times and happy users.
   -> Make sure to plan for peak-hour bandwidth needs.
4. Reliability – Service availability/reliability depends mainly on two factors for hosted email:  service uptime and connectivity.  Hosted services are still weak on SLA commitments and proactive monitoring/notification of service outages. Connectivity problems can cut off users from their data possibly for an extended period of time, as few (smaller) companies have redundant Internet access in place.
   -> Consider deploying multiple access paths, and review service level commitments and planned downtime schedules carefully.
5. Integration – Email should really not be treated as an isolated messaging service. The premise of unified communication is starting to deliver on its potential. Many companies are already deploying integrated solutions that combine email, IM, eMeetings, telephony and presence with other collaborative applications, and even with traditional enterprise software such as CRM and ERP. None of the current hosted offerings can provide such feature-rich capabilities yet. Furthermore, any existing integration points may be severed or will be costly to reestablish with a hosted service.
   -> Carefully review the integration between your existing email and other enterprise apps, and evaluate possible barriers for future integration and unified messaging plans.
6. Scalability – Many users are already complaining about mailbox and message size restrictions imposed on their on-premise systems. Hosted solutions will have similar limitations although typically driven by cost considerations.
   -> Make sure to evaluate the needs of your power users.
7. Cost – The promise of significant cost reduction is often the most compelling reason to consider a hosted solution. All of the issues listed above play into the cost model, and critical cost drivers such as necessary bandwidth upgrades and premiums paid for power users are often overlooked in the initial assessment.
   -> List all requirements and all current costs associated with providing the on-premise services for a thorough comparison to the hosted service.

Technorati Tags: hosted email, SaaS, hosted service

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Our analysis of large messaging environments over many years has revealed that in most companies 80% of the corporate messaging resources are being consumed by only about 1% of all employees.

This is a significant finding especially in times where tight IT budgets are strained by rapidly growing message volumes and resulting skyrocketing bandwidth & storage costs.

What this really means is that there is a huge opportunity to dramatically reduce operating costs by going after the cause of this excessive email traffic. Don’t worry, I am not proposing to fire the 1% of offending employees.

There are ways to manage email more efficiently without adversely affecting users or business operation.

Permessa just published a whitepaper (I am a co-author), titled “6 Best Practices That Reduce Email Overload and Costs”. The paper highlights areas for managing excessive email traffic, such as unnecessary reply-to-all, attachment ping-pong and the overuse of mailing lists. Some of these have been previously discussed on this blog. For each topic area the whitepaper makes best practice recommendations on how to implement email policy changes that can prevent the negative effects and help save money.

Technorati Tags: email costs, information overload, best practices to reduce email overload, permessa

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SharePoint has been a $1 Billion success for Microsoft although the platform is still struggling with enterprise-wide adoption due to integration and scalability issues. IBM Lotus is hoping to stop/slow SharePoint’s growth with Quickr’s enterprise grade scale (J2EE, WebSphere, DB2) and attractive web 2.0 features that tightly integrate not only with Lotus Notes 8 but also with Microsoft Office.

Enterprise customers will certainly benefit as this competition heats up.

Technorati Tags: quickr, sharepoint, content integration

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“Consider email quantity. Where once we sent and received only a handful of emails daily, today we routinely send and receive hundreds of emails. You might argue that the volumes are increasing exponentially.

Finally, consider mailbox size. A 10MB mailbox was once the norm and was replaced with 100-200MB mailboxes in recent years. Today users expect multigigabyte mailboxes, made famous by Google’s Gmail.”

Interestingly Bob’s prediction for the future holds true already. We routinely see very large mailboxes at our customers, often exceeding the 10GB mark.

Just like Moore’s law, which will eventually hit the atom barrier, the usefulness of email will diminish as mailbox size and message load keep growing exponentially.

Technorati Tags: email growth, moore’s law, ferris

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