Peter Presnell: Notes 8.5.1 Helps Break Box Office Record
December 1 2009
This is such a cool story about practical use of Lotus Notes and Domino, and how the best technology can help a company win in the marketplace:
While only a small company with less than 200 employees, it has to find a way to manage 10 million e-mail messages. That's an average of 50,000 messages per person that grows at an average rate of 2.25GB per day. In the marketing department multimedia content has seen some individual mail files grow to 72 GB. Busy executives rarely find time to file their mail so in-boxes can contain as many as 75,000 messages. Summit's Directory system is upside down to most companies. They have a small internal directory with around 200 entries linked to a separate Notes application (the Summit Rolodex) with around 17,000 external contacts.Congratulations to Summit Entertainment on their use of Notes/Domino to produce tremendously successful films.
All the above is handled using a single (Linux) mail server running Domino 8.5.1. ... And the cost to keep all this running? Well Charles has a very small team that keeps the mail system running. I am the sole Domino Administrator for which I only need to maintain an average of 8 hours per week to keep the entire Domino infrastructure running in a clean/stable state.
Link: Peter Presnell: Notes 8.5.1 Helps Break Box Office Record >
Post a Comment
- 2
Timothy Briley | 12/1/2009 1:23:02 PM
While I'm glad the Domino server hasn't crashed, I'm not surprised.
On the other hand, how are the users not crashing?
- 3
Tripp Black http://www.mindwatering.com | 12/1/2009 2:01:39 PM
Beautiful.
- 4
Darren http://www.dadams.co.uk | 12/1/2009 2:49:10 PM
Bravo for the Domino server, but sounds like there's something else required. E-mails piling up at that rate would say to me that e-mail is working as a solution... so how about collaborative file sharing and activities?
- 5
Erik Brooks | 12/1/2009 3:21:04 PM
@1 - I think they mean their current mail file would be 72GB without DAOS. But you're right -- they could never have had a 72GB mail file pre-DAOS (unless you're somehow counting archiving in there). NSF simply doesn't support more than 64GB physical size.
In short: if you turned off DAOS their mail files would bust.
They also can't currently create a local replica of said user's mail file (DAOS or not), whereas they might have been able to before they crossed the 64GB threshold.
Still a cool story, though.
- 6
Christopher Byrne http://www.controlscaddy.com/ | 12/1/2009 3:32:25 PM
Too bad it wasn't for a decent movie;-)
- 7
Mike Robinson http://www.invcs.com | 12/1/2009 4:59:26 PM
Tried to read the story but the link takes me to a blog entry with nothing but the subject? I was hoping to see where it's mentioned they are using DAOS.
- 8
Nick Halliwell http://www.comware.net | 12/1/2009 8:20:21 PM
@2 Why would the server crash? When Notes is correctly configured its bullet proof.
@5 Notes nsf can scale to any size, generally its the OS that is the limiting factor. Its just that IBM will not provide support if the Db is greater than 64 Gb. There is no other technical limit.
I have a mail file that has over 110,000 document in it going back to 1996, its about 12 Gb. I experience zero problems with it. I am often on the Beta test programs and again minimal problems. The only issue is if I allow my in box to get too big (greater than about 3K records)and the Beta crashes, it can take 20 mins to do the consistency check.
Now I can already here the moans and sighs out there, why don't I archive or delete some mails. Its simple, I don't want to. I want all my mails in 1 place I find it easier and Notes works with me perfectly.
- 9
Timothy Briley | 12/1/2009 10:57:58 PM
@8 Read @2 again.
@4 Exactly.
- 10
Henning Heinz | 12/2/2009 4:34:46 AM
@8Nick
Notes nsf cannot scale to any size. I think it was a soft (unsupported) limit a long time ago but became a hard (forced) nsf limitation. A nsf database that goes beyond 64GB will not work without DAOS, at least not on the platforms I am aware of.
{ Link }
I admit I haven't tried it with R8 yet. I also asked the question on Peter Presnells website and he explained it very well.
- 11
Erik Brooks | 12/2/2009 8:10:39 AM
@8 - I know NSF can handle tons of docs -- I've got some NSFs with nearly 2 million docs in them. If you can address performance and write-contention concerns the read access is blazingly fast.
NSFs limit used to be the OS's limit back when OSes had limits of < 64GB (FAT16, etc.) But today's OSes have limits about 3 orders-of-magnitude past that.
@6 - LOL!
- 13
Adam Brown http://www.isw.com.au | 12/2/2009 7:47:33 PM
Ed is right. It is a great story. There is often a perception in the market that Notes/Domino is for the big end of town. We often re-enforce this perception with case studies of massive companies, promotion of the great scalability capability of Domino etc.
The reality is far from it. I know of dozens of small businesses that do amazing things with Notes/Domino that allows them to punch well above their weight. Many of them don't have any Domino Administrators at all and there business administrators manages users etc. Domino just ticks along with no problem month after month, year after year. I think we need more stories like this of how small and medium business leverage Lotus to be great!
- 14
Sean Burgess http://www.asnddesigns.com/ | 12/3/2009 11:38:44 PM
@Ed Is there any way we can get this turned into a Case Study that we can reference and distribute to our customers?
72 GB mail file? Ah-hem.