ID201 : IBM Lotus Domino, A look ahead

Going to look at Domino 8, Domino 8.0.1 and the future roadmap for Domino 8.5.

Domino 8.5 is expected to ship in the second half of 2008 and there are already plans for the versions after that. Domino 8.5 is a big release with a lot of new features.

Domino 8.0 server had a lot of important new features like faster AdminP, Message Recall, better Out of Office and major I/O rate improvments. The addition of design compression has also helped with I/O reduction on the server. A lot of the I/O improvments will be apparented only with the ODS48 enabled.

Domino 8.0 introduced Streaming Cluster Replication. It is a move from a per database cluster replication to a server based model. Has resulted in a 10% CPU reduction and average latency has reduced in a 4000 user environment from over 250 seconds to 5 seconds.

New designer option allows you to disable the creation of indexes for sort orders. It saves space and I/O by not creation an index for a sort order unless it is used.

Design note compression, a new option on the database properties needs to be ticked and then to enable it on the server you type ‘Load compact -n’ and to disable type ‘Load compact -N’ It can reduce disk space on design elements by about 70%. A compressed 8.0.1 mail template is 9Mb, and a uncompressed 8.0 mail template is 27Mb.

Lotus Domino 8.0 with Blackberry also has reduced cpu usage. A new API to find database changes will be utilized by the next BB server.

8.0.1 brings us a 64 bit native server. Windows 2003 x64 and AIX will be supported in 8.0.1 All 32bit platforms will continue to be supported.

Document compression ( like design compression ) which is completely transparent to third party API’s and attachments can be stored separately using DAOS. average saving is about 40% depending on the database and content. I/O is also reduced by about 20%. It is possible in 8.5 that the notes client may be able to receive a compressed design element or document and do the decompression on it’s side which would mean even less bandwidth usage and move the decompression task to the client.

Domino 8.01 and introduces Traveller. Free push email to a number of mobile clients ( not the iPhone )

Domino 8.5 has a load of new features. Easier ID management, further reduced storage costs, better QOS and of course modernization of domino web apps.

The ID Management will eliminate the need to enter notes passwords, simplify the lost password and ID recovery and eliminate the need to keep ID files across multiple clients syncd and will also allow IT to remove the need for the domino directory and allow you to use an external LDAP server.

Improved Single Signon. User signs into Windows, Windows provided access to encrypted key to unlock notes.id and there are no passwords to sync. password changes are only required in Windows.

The ID Vault. Store ID’s in secure server side vault. Has protocol level integration to the notes cleint. You can have 1 or more vaults per domain. Audit logging of all vault access and methods to prevent spoofing etc. Vaults can be repliacted.

Existing users will have their ID populated to the vault automatically. New users will have their ID’s provisioned directly into the vault. During authentication Notes 8.5 will download id updated from the vault or upload changes to the vault. Vault allows secure administrator and programatic password resets. ( WooHoo )

the programatic password resetting could be handy for helpdesks. I think that HADSL’s FirM product will have something like this fairly quickly.

Lotus Domino 8.5 LDAP options. Optionally per server you can replace the domino directory with an LDAP server. Domino person attribs will be stored in the domino directory. All other information will be stored in to Domino Configuration Database. New API’s for domino directory integration for third party tools. Active Directory will be supported first and then extended to other LDAP systems.

Domino Attachment And Object Store. Moved JUST ATTACHMENTS to a seperate store and can recognise when an attachment was sent to multiple users so that it does not store duplicates in the store. Unlike Shared Mail it does not use a .nsf to store the information. It moves them out to the file system and compresses the files etc. From a backup perspective this makes it better as a .nsf would be changing daily while separate files would only be written to backup once.

With no attachments in the mailfile then compaction and document note compression is even better and faster. The separate files on the file system also means no single point of failure.

DAOS is… Local to a single server ( not cross server ) Requires Transation logging to be enabled. Requires a new ODS version in 8.5, It is API transparent, objects will count towards quote and are reported in database size. DOES NOT SHARE ANY CODE WITH SCOS.

Domino 8.5 Update Task. Looking at adding a per-database out-out of the update task so for infrequently used databases it will reduce the I/O on the server. the Updall task running at night will still update the indexes.

Mail.box will be optimized. Going to try avoid writing content to disk during a steady state and use a message queue method to make I/O faster. Transaction logging will need to be enabled for mail.box which is opposite to recommendations today.

Domino Configuration Tuner. Will detect misconfigurations according to best practices. The goal is to make your server faster and reduce your support costs just by looking at databases settings etc. It will require no changes to the Domino server and is a client based tools that is a self-contained application. Will be updated separately to standard server/cleint releases. Looks good to me as a way to optimize your server settings for best performance.