Hold onto your hats – and your checkbooks – if you’re looking at the native implementation of Lotus Domino for the AS/400. AS/400s running IBM’s OS/400 V4R2 operating system, the one that exists to support Lotus Domino, may offer impressive scalability, but they do so at a great cost. On recently published NotesBench benchmark tests, a twelve-way AS/400e was able to support over 10,000 Lotus Domino mail users with average response times under a tenth of a second.
By Timothy Prickett Morgan
While this is noteworthy – pardon the pun) – the scalability of the AS/400es is no better than high-end Unix servers from HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems, which have not been sized up with the NotesBench test but which nonetheless can support as many or more Domino users. And while IBM can claim the AS/400 handily beats four-way PC servers running Domino, which typically support 4,500 Mail users, the company will not be able to make such claims after PC servers using Intel Slot 2 processors are on the market in June using the new Xeon Pentium II chips. The Slot 2 processors will offer more cache memory, better SMP efficiency and greater scalability than current four-way Pentium Pro processors and two- way Pentium II processors offer. It is likely that an eight-way Xeon Pentium II server will beat the tar out of a twelve-way AS/400e Apache server. IBM will, of course, be shipping eight- and twelve-way Northstar servers by this time, again extending its scalability beyond that offered by PC servers. IBM will no doubt be able to host 20,000 or 30,000 simulated Lotus Mail users on such machines, and in the meantime its AS/400 customer base will give its real Lotus Mail users accounts on Xeon NT servers.
Not as bad as it looks
Why, you ask? Because IBM’s much-touted native Domino support costs between five and ten times as much per user as does Domino on Unix and NT. The Domino for AS/400 situation is not as bad as it looks at first glance. (Not that it isn’t bad, mind you. It is.) The server that the AS/400 division used in its tests was over configured, at least according to IBM’s own native AS/400 Domino guidelines. IBM tells customers that each AS/400 Domino Mail user will require at least 512 kilobytes of server memory and 50 megabytes of disk space. On the NotesBench test, IBM configured the AS/400e Apache server, a twelve-way S40-2261, with 20 gigabytes memory. This is four times the memory that IBM says the machine should require to give acceptable response times, rather than the tenth of a second average response that IBM beat out of the S40. While IBM undoubtedly wanted to show great response times on the AS/400, it is far more likely that native Domino was the centerpiece of the Lotusphere trade show and IBM’s implementation was running later than it expected – the tests were run days before Lotusphere. Big Blue’s techies in the Rochester Labs, where the NotesBench tests were run, ran out of time to tune the system and just threw memory at the problem until the Domino servers stabilized.
Scale terribly
When trying to show good price/performance, this is probably not the best tactic. The memory on the AS/400e S40 cost more than twice as much as the server itself, bringing the total server cost to $1.4m or $137 per Domino Mail user. (The NotesBench average cost per user is around $10 to $15 with Unix and NT servers, many of which, as IBM correctly points out, are not terribly scalable. Or, more precisely, they scale terribly.) With only 5 gigabytes of memory – all that should have been required to support 10,400 users – and proper tuning to add another 1,000 users and to get response times in the one second range rather than a tenth of a second – IBM was only using 57 percent of the S40’s processing capacity, rather than the recommended 65 percent – the S40 would have cost only $871,000 or $76 per user. Half as much. While that would be a remarkable improvement, it would not be enough to make Domino for the AS/400 competitive with Unix and NT servers. This is the bad part. Even if IBM cut AS/400 prices in half, it still wouldn’t be enough. And giving away Domino won’t help either. Domino for the AS/400 costs $1,495 for a single processor server. Licenses for two- and four-way servers cost $3,495 and licenses for five-way or bigger servers cost $16,250. In the AS/400 scheme of things, this is cheap software.
Tight integration
Domino runs especially well on Windows NT, so the competitive situation for native AS/400 Domino is pretty bad. Even with more tuning and severe, unheard of discounts from IBM – on the order of 50 percent off list – an AS/400e server supporting Domino will be two to three times as expensive as an NT server with equal power. The case for AS/400e systems – the models that most AS/400 customers will buy – is even harder to make. And should customers opt for the next best AS/400 solution – running Domino on the much, much cheaper AS/400 Integrated PC Server cards – tight integration of Domino with AS/400 databases and other resources, the very raison d’etre for native Domino, goes out the window since Domino on the IPCS, like regular PC server implementations, does not integrate well with the AS/400. Lots of information that customers want to share between AS/400s and Domino servers has to be updated in batch mode. Still, for customers looking more for an email solution rather than a groupware or e-commerce development platform, the new 200 megahertz IPCS cards can handle about 1,450 Domino users, which means that a few of these cards working in concert can probably handle all the e-mail and groupware that most AS/400 customers need. After all, the typical AS/400 shop has a few hundred end users, not tens of thousands. And best of all, the IPCS solution costs less than $10 per Notes user – a price that is competitive with real PC servers.
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