Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Honey, Domino Really Does Save Space

What can it do for our garage?

While doing some testing of migrating a CIO's email from Microsoft Outlook 2007 to Lotus Notes we took a 190MB PST file and after it moved to a mail file it was now.....77MB.

A 60% saving in disk space and this is before DAOS or anything else has been done to the file.

We know there is a hardware multiplier if one leaves Domino to go to Microsoft Exchange of between 2-3 (sometimes more) times as many boxes are needed to sustain the equivalent in Exchange that ran under Lotus Domino.

You can add disk space bloat as well. Imagine having to double your SAN on top of all your other expenses of the migration.

It never ends does it.

Edit 7/28 9:50am - I ran compact on the PST, it now has shrunk to 165MB. Domino still uses over 50% less disk space to store the same data as Exchange. I will get before and after data from more people as we work on them to see if this is consistent or not.

5 comments:

  1. Not wanting to rain on your parade, but I'm pretty sure Outlook has a mechanism similar to "compact" and I'd guess it hasn't been done in ages.

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  2. Recent Exchange migration.

    Exchange folder contents 4.43GB.

    Domino Mail folder contents (6 user databases) after creating the accounts 2.96gb.

    After DAOS, the mail folder came down to 826MB. DAOS storage 1.36GB.

    Doesn't matter how you work it out, it's better than a 50% disk saving by migrating to Domino and implementing DAOS.

    Yes, there is a compact utility for PST, but the internal structure of PST doesn't handle attachments the same way as Notes/Domino.

    I've never seen an Outlook user running around with a 9GB active PST and a 13GB archive PST file that's been around since 1995 and used with every version since Outlook 97.

    And I certainly haven't seen an Outlook user run a search on the 13GB file that returns results (including the content of attachments) in just a few seconds.

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  3. Jmichael, I have just run the compact on the PST and posted the results. Domino still beats Exchange easily by 50%.

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  4. @Mat, that is exactly what I have been advocating for years, one file, from R1 to R8.5 and still works 18 years later I have all my mail and apps from day one. Can't do it for anything Microsoft.

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  5. A small local company (5 users) recently got bought out by a national firm. We had to help them move from Notes 7 to Outlook today to get them on to the same system as the rest of the organisation.

    Managers .nsf = 1.9gb

    45 minutes later...

    Managers .pst = 2.4gb

    As I said, Notes 7, no DAOS. Not an old .pst that needed clean-up or compaction.

    That's a 25% increase.

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