All is well that ends well. Well, it hasn’t quite ended just yet. But, damn!, I’m good. Alex, even though you’ve been a manager for the past 3 years, you still got it! After several days of going back and forth with IBM tech support, where they just never seemed to be able to gather enough information to diagnose the problem, I found an SPR that described the very same problem, with exact same symptoms and the very same resulting error message. The SPR was supposed to have been fixed i the Domino 8.0.1 code stream. But here it was again, an apparent regression bug of sorts, causing the poor server to hang every morning. Basically, the router was getting into a lock situation trying to access one of the mail.box files and running an LZ1 compression algorithm.
Unfortunately, this thing doesn’t appear to be easy to solve. We were hoping that the development team would be able to put together a hot fix in a matter of hours, after all, they did solve it once before. However, they confirmed that the fix for that SPR is in the 8.5 code stream. So now we’re waiting, with baited breath, to hear what the development team comes back with. Come on, Westford folks, make me proud!
And while we’re waiting, a few interesting observations while working with the IT team of this particular client, if I may.
For reasons unknown to me, this organization is on its 3rd mail system. Once upon the time, they were an Exchange shop. Then later they moved to GroupWise. And now they are a Lotus shop. While I am not completely clear on their decision to move to Domino, some part of that decision was based on their ability to run mail server on top of AIX. Some years ago, AIX was my favorite platform to run Domino on: it was rock solid, required minimal maintenance and ran well. These folks did their homework. They had talked to a number of companies that ran Domino on AIX and everyone confirmed that AIX and Domino is a winning combination.
They told me of one company they spoke to, which used to run Domino on the iSeries (i5 OS, I believe). It ran so poorly that the company decided to move off Domino to Exchange. Then, somewhere along the process, they tried moving Domino on to AIX and it ran so well, that they canceled their Exchange migration and stayed with Lotus, although now on top of AIX.
Having said that, some of the younger members of the IT team did tell me that they didn’t like the Notes client. They thought it wasn’t as user friendly as even the latest version of GroupWise that they ran. They readily acknowledged that Domino ran better and did things better than GroupWise; that a lot of email problems that they had with GroupWise simply went away when they moved to Domino. But they still complained of usability of the Notes client.
This is nothing new. I’ve been saying this for quite some time now. IBM makes great servers. Lotus makes a great server, there’s probably none better. Their client though is not so much. How I wish that IBM would support other email clients with full fidelity. This client in Omaha is a great case study of that. The admins love AIX, the admins love Domino, let the users run whatever they want to run: Notes, Outlook, Mac Mail, Thunderbird, whatever else. And may system administrators and end users exist in perfect peace and harmony. Like the famous bumper sticker says: “COEXIST”.
Filed under: Collaboration, IBM, Lotus Notes | Tagged: IBM, Lotus, Lotus Domino 8.5, Lotus Notes, Lotus Notes 8.5, PSC
We were one of those shops that had Domino on a very under-performing i5/OS box (I believe it was in the era when it was called iSeries or AS/400).
Prior to my tenure as Notes admin, they had Domino 4.6 on an NT server which died. For some reason they didn’t have a backup. So for the replacement, reliability was desired above all. Since we had AS/400 which was trusted for our ERP system and had a good backup facility they purchased a baby AS/400. It was horrible in performance, but never let us down. We upgraded through the Domino versions and when the lease was up, got a newer faster i5/OS box which blew the doors off. Now we run 4 servers, at different release levels on the same box and its overall we are pretty satisfied.
There were a couple of things that caught my attention on your blog post:
1. The IT at your costumer said that admitedly, Domino had fewer problems, ran better, and was more solid than their previous email system (groupwise)… but still, preferred the old system. That seems to me that the problem is more in the change management part of the project, rather than the technological.
And this is were many migrations go to fail when it comes to Domino.
In my opinion, a successful migration project is not only one where all goes well on the infrastructure, and all old systems are effectively migrated. A successful migration project also requires as well the users to be OK with the change. That, in my opinion is the hardest part. Resistance to change is very underestimated. And so is how passionate are users (and admins!) when it comes to their mail client.
2. Seems odd that a company decided that Domino on iSeries was running poorly. In my experience, you can literally kick an iSeries with Domino in it and still won’t go down. Of course, tuning for peak performance one of those boxes is a lot harder than an AIX.
3. Freedom of choice is not always a good solution for everyone. What I’ve seen in costumers that have two or more different mail clients (even if they are connecting to the same infrastructure) is that they incur in much higher support costs, as they are sometimes unable to standarise their support practices and heavily rely on user knowledge for self support. besides… it also can come at a price in terms of security. I do agree, however, that the Notes client is not the right solution for everyone.