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Lotus 6: IBM Details Internal Deployment

As IBM Corp. ramps up for the launch of Lotus Notes and Domino 6, Big Blue is releasing details of its internal deployment of the messaging and collaboration platform.

Version 6 is scheduled to be released this quarter. It is the biggest Lotus product launch in several years.

IBM began deploying Lotus 6 internally in September 2000 on pSeries servers running IBM's AIX flavor of Unix. IBM Lotus made a release candidate of the software available to customers this February. At least one major customer has been testing the pre-release version of the multi-platform software on Windows NT servers, according to Lotus.

Lotus used the IBM deployment to show scalability, consolidation and other cost-of-ownership benefits of the new version of its software. Highlights of the deployment, according to Lotus, include:

  • IBM had more than 20,000 users hosted on Lotus Domino 6 servers by the start of this calendar quarter. About 5,000 IBM users were on Lotus Notes 6 clients at that point.
  • About 900,000 messages were being routed over the Domino 6 servers each day.
  • Twenty-four unmodified Domino 5 applications were hosted on Domino 6.
  • IBM expects to reduce its number of Domino hardware servers from around 700 prior to version 6 to about 40. Features of the new version that aid in consolidation include multi-language support on a single Domino server, multi-client support, better storage compression, better network compression, better server reliability, enhanced management tools and more efficient replication for mobile users.

  • About the Author

    Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

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