Build a Gold Standard Domino Server at Your Site
Category Administration
It's faint praise, to be sure, but Domino servers can run under the most bizarre configurations and resource weak environments. At the last DC Lotus Notes User Group I raised the topic of sponsoring a "Gold" standard for Domino configurations.
Here's the pitch-- at many companies I visit, and with the many administrators that I talk to, it's obvious that a surprising percentage of Domino servers are either over-taxed or mis-configured. You and I know that eventually these servers will degrade from merely limping along to a state of crash and burn. I can chart out the progress, and extrapolate a failure from captured statistics, but senior management rarely listens. The response is usually something like, "hard drives are cheap, we'll just buy more."
As I see it, many IT shops are so focused on reducing the cost of IT infrastructure, that they actually tolerate the instability which accompanies their lean budgets. After all, the IT staff is salaried, and they can put in the necessary long hours to keep operations running.
The idea of a Gold standard, is to reserve one production Domino server in every shop to be correctly configured, monitored, and given the recommended resources. With the Gold Domino server providing a baseline for stability and responsiveness, it's an easier sell to upper management to convert the remaining Domino servers to a Gold standard.
The DCNUG.org will be sponsoring a wiki for documenting the Gold standard in Domino implementations. In the meantime, the Domino 7 Performance Tuning - Best Practices to Get the Most Out of Your Domino Infrastructure has just received the latest draft update.
It's faint praise, to be sure, but Domino servers can run under the most bizarre configurations and resource weak environments. At the last DC Lotus Notes User Group I raised the topic of sponsoring a "Gold" standard for Domino configurations.
Here's the pitch-- at many companies I visit, and with the many administrators that I talk to, it's obvious that a surprising percentage of Domino servers are either over-taxed or mis-configured. You and I know that eventually these servers will degrade from merely limping along to a state of crash and burn. I can chart out the progress, and extrapolate a failure from captured statistics, but senior management rarely listens. The response is usually something like, "hard drives are cheap, we'll just buy more."
As I see it, many IT shops are so focused on reducing the cost of IT infrastructure, that they actually tolerate the instability which accompanies their lean budgets. After all, the IT staff is salaried, and they can put in the necessary long hours to keep operations running.
The idea of a Gold standard, is to reserve one production Domino server in every shop to be correctly configured, monitored, and given the recommended resources. With the Gold Domino server providing a baseline for stability and responsiveness, it's an easier sell to upper management to convert the remaining Domino servers to a Gold standard.
The DCNUG.org will be sponsoring a wiki for documenting the Gold standard in Domino implementations. In the meantime, the Domino 7 Performance Tuning - Best Practices to Get the Most Out of Your Domino Infrastructure has just received the latest draft update.
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Comments
Posted by Jack Dausman At 01:39:34 AM On 08/09/2006 | - Website - |
I know a few friends whose employers ditched Notes for Exchange because of performance problems and stability. After hearing the symptoms, it became clear that no one ever bothered to do any periodic tuning, and they didn't use any policies, so settings were just tweaked ad-hoc, and probably by a few generations of sys-admins. So they dumped for Microsoft and were ecstatic. It works great!!!
Well, no @#%^! You ripped out the whole infrastructure and started all over again at 7 times of what they had to pay to build the infrastructure in the first place. The expense of having a few techs pour over a few tuning guides and spend a weekend tightening the screws would've been trivial.
Ahhh management!
You know, it's funny. Growing up, I believed this whole myth about corporate efficiency. What a crock. Most corporations are a giant cubicle hive of hemorrhaging waste.
Anyway, cheers. You have my vote.
Posted by Samuel deHuszar Allen At 12:59:27 AM On 08/09/2006 | - Website - |
I don't think a high standard means low-usage, but I think it means not being over-taxed and includes configurations like transaction logging backups, DDM, policy/settings, etc.
It's just a weapon in the rhetoric wars on justifying expenditures.
Posted by jack dausman At 04:59:18 AM On 08/08/2006 | - Website - |
If successful, I think it also probably opens a can of worms (that will get released soon anyway). I would hate to be the administrator that convinces an organization to upgrade all of the servers to the new "gold standard" only to find them woefully inadequate next year when Hannover is released. Maybe I am too pessimistic, but if my experience with WCS is applicable, then Hannover will probably take 2-3 times the resources required by Domino to do the same "work".
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I still like the idea of creating the standard that establishes a benchmark for the ideal configuration since there is not enough real world information out there. (Too bad “PM for Domino” didn’t work out – by now it would have collected quite a quantity of performance information)
Posted by kit At 03:37:02 AM On 08/08/2006 | - Website - |