When you’re making IT decisions, your choices are overwhelming—especially with products that run on multiple platforms, like Lotus’ Domino. With Domino, once you make the decision to put your money behind it, you need to start looking at which system you’re going to run it on. And that’s not easy. Everyone claims to be the best. Everyone screams, “Reliability!” Everyone boasts of “solutions.” Many advertise their “record- breaking performance” or their being “first in scalability.”

How are you supposed to make a decision with all the industry hype, jargon, and other statements that either are simply not true or are dependent on a hundred different factors? You need to keep things black and white. This article will have the technical information you need to make your IT decisions regarding collaborative environments and choice of server. For me, it can be summed up in three words: reliability, scalability, and integration.

Domino and the AS/400: Hand in Glove

To help you understand why Domino for AS/400 is a black and white issue, let me tell you a bit about the history of this project. Domino for AS/400 was developed by teams at two different locations: Rochester, Minnesota, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, headquarters of Lotus Development. The teams started thinking about the project nearly two years ago. When we began, our intent was to add value to the AS/400 through Domino’s powerful capabilities. Over the past two years, however, we learned that we could do much more than that. We discovered that the Domino architecture and the AS/400 architecture exploit each other beautifully—you could say the fit was like a hand in a glove.

As a result, we found that the AS/400 added significant value to Domino. In fact, I believe that no other single-system platform brings more value to Domino than the AS/400. Why do I say that? To understand Domino for AS/400, you first need to understand the AS/400.

Let’s start with some numbers: The AS/400 is the most popular multiuser business computer in the world. Over 500,000 AS/400s are installed worldwide, including installations in well over 90 percent of the top 100 Fortune 500 companies. IBM’s AS/400 Division has over 8,000 Business Partners who have created over 30,000 AS/400 business applications. We enjoy best-of-breed customer loyalty: Over 90 percent of AS/400 customers would recommend buying an AS/400 to others.

Why has the AS/400 been so successful over the decade? Why have so many developers created solutions for us? Because of the AS/400 value proposition: simplicity achieved through integration. The AS/400 has proven to be a very cost-effective purchase, because the price doesn’t continue to add up as you own it, and it doesn’t take a large staff of people to manage it. In fact, several studies by IDC, an independent technology research group, have shown that the AS/400 has the lowest total cost of ownership of any business computer in the world.

On top of these facts and figures, we’ve done a pretty cool job of leading the industry in new technology. In fact, the AS/400 was the first system in the industry to implement a 64-bit PowerPC RISC processor, with an operating system and all application software running in true 64-bit mode. The AS/400 is 64-bit, from top to bottom. Remember that when I talk about Domino for AS/400’s scalability a little later on.

Where the Domino Falls

The previous statistics speak for themselves about the AS/400, but what is black and white about Domino? Like the AS/400, it offers simplicity through integration. Use of Domino is simple because it is easy to integrate with the AS/400; they are perfect partners. With Domino, as with the AS/400, your costs don’t pile up over time, and you have everything you need to get rolling with just one purchase.

But you need to remember that there are actually three separate products. The first is OS/400 Version 4 Release 2, which is the Domino-ready AS/400 operating system release. The second is Lotus NotesPump for AS/400, which delivers additional integration functions between Domino and DB2/400 (also known as DB2 for OS/400). The release shipped is NotesPump 2.5. Last, but not least, is Lotus Domino R4.6 for AS/400.

As with all platforms, Domino for AS/400 is a Lotus product; it’s owned, packaged, distributed, and serviced by Lotus. Because Domino ships independently, you do not need to keep the Domino software in sync with OS/400. That means Lotus will be able to keep the Domino for AS/400 product at the same release level as it will be on other platforms.

Reliability

In order to talk about the reliability of Domino for AS/400, I need to talk about the AS/400’s architecture. To illustrate how robust the AS/400 is, let’s compare it to other platforms.

Other platforms start with a processor, typically from Intel. Another vendor takes that processor and builds the hardware around it. Of course, another vendor comes along with an operating system, typically from Microsoft. Then, once the computer is built, you put together the rest of the pieces. That may include a database from one vendor and systems management and security software from another. And, depending on the use of the machine, you may even need crash protection programs in an effort to keep your new system operational.

While these separately built products may appear to run OK on the surface (i.e., you install them and run them), you are actually missing something crucial for running your business—“recoverability.” It’s extremely difficult to predict how parts and software

can fail—and it is nearly impossible for the developers of a piecemeal solution to build the kind of cross-product recoverability the AS/400 offers.

The AS/400 from the Ground Up

The AS/400 starts with a 64-bit PowerPC processor built in Rochester. Engineers then take the chip and put the hardware wrappers around it—again, in Rochester. Then, that same team puts a layer of object-oriented licensed internal code (LIC) on top of the hardware—code written to exploit the 64-bit technology. This LIC creates a technology- independent machine interface (TIMI) for the operating system to interface with. It’s this TIMI that insulates the operating system from hardware changes. Within the operating system, we include everything that a business needs to deploy its server solutions: database, systems management, security, communications, an internet server, a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and much more.

All of these pieces of technology are custom-designed to work to their full potential with the other pieces of the AS/400. They aren’t built separately and added to the operating system; they are custom-built as part of the operating system. They are interdependent.

And finally, the AS/400 includes built-in recovery—with over half of the LIC dedicated to recoverability. Combine this recovery with the system integration, RAID protection, uninterrupted power supply (UPS), superior storage, and memory management, and the result is a rock-solid, stable system that is available to users all the time. That’s why AS/400 customers see greater than 99.9 percent single-system availability.

Domino on Other Platforms

So far, you’ve seen just the AS/400 half of the Domino for AS/400 reliability story. In order to more clearly understand the power of Domino for AS/400, we need to look at Domino as an application on different platforms. Take a look at applications running on another system.

Fire up a few processes. These may be used for any number of things—perhaps file serving or productivity tools. With other operating systems (such as Windows NT), you know that viewing a list of currently active processes does not provide much information about the actual work being done. And when you run applications like Domino, which can start up many processes, your list can get quite long. If you start up multiple Domino servers on the same system, it can get downright messy.

As you well know, any number of things can happen on a system to cause processes to fail, and processes can fail in any number of ways: They can crash, hang, or consume system resources. When that happens with most platforms, system administrators have great difficulty figuring out how the failing processes are affecting all of the other applications on the system. In fact, administrators often can’t catch the problem in time—resulting in a system crash. Even if it is caught in time, the typical recovery is to manually end all of the processes on the system, clean things up, and restart everything.

Regardless of what happens, the outcome is that applications, including Domino, are unavailable to users for a time, and manual intervention is required. How do some companies solve this problem? Typically, they purchase many different, specialized systems. To ensure continuous availability, many of them purchase even more systems and cluster them together for automatic failover from one system to another. The result is separate servers for different applications—email, the Web, the database, and other mission-critical applications—and users spread across far more systems than what the Domino product requires. The system administrator has to handle not only the mishmash of processes on one system, but on many systems. At the same time, the system

administrator must manage the LAN, watch the LAN traffic, and perform backups on the network.

Obviously, with this “solution,” expenses and workload pile up quickly. With the AS/400, this headache is avoided. The AS/400 is the only system in the world with the concept of a robust subsystem, which can be used to organize processes on your system—and manage resources like the system memory pool and CPU priority.

On the AS/400, all of your non-Domino processes can exist in subsystems all by themselves. When you start up a Domino server, the AS/400 automatically creates a subsystem specifically for it. By allocating appropriate system resources, an application in one subsystem won’t affect any other subsystem. You can feel comfortable running your Domino server on the same system as your other mission-critical applications. You can even fire up multiple Domino servers on this same system—allocating to each the system resources appropriate for that particular server. I say this with confidence because one AS/400 has been tested to run up to 16 Domino servers—using Domino Advanced Services and only one Domino license. Each of these partitioned Domino servers runs independently in its own subsystem and does not impact the others.

As you can see, the AS/400 subsystem technology fits perfectly with Domino’s partitioning technology. Because of that, IBM recommends a configuration that other systems don’t. For continuous availability on AS/400s, you should cluster multiple Domino partitions on a single system. This isn’t something that’s recommended on other systems because it just doesn’t make sense. On other systems, if one Domino partition has a problem, the others aren’t completely safe. On the AS/400, they are perfectly safe. By clustering AS/400 partitions—as opposed to clustering multiple different systems—you are greatly simplifying your systems and network management efforts as well as significantly reducing your LAN traffic. This is a staggering advantage to the AS/400 platform.

But that’s not even the coolest part. Since the AS/400 system doesn’t crash when one of its processes has a problem, the AS/400 can be its own system administrator. If, by some chance, you have a problem with one of the Domino processes, “watch dog” jobs built into each subsystem keep an eye on the rest of the Domino server. You can configure your Domino partition in such a way that, in the event of a problem in your system affecting your Domino server, the watch dog will automatically bring down the Domino server partition (not the system) in a controlled manner and start it back up without affecting any of the other Domino partitions or anything else running on the system. By combining this automatic recovery with our clustering in a box and our AS/400 system reliability, we are able to ensure that your AS/400 Domino Server will be down only when you plan for it to be down.

Scalability

When we first started this project nearly two years ago, we made some pretty bold claims regarding our scalability goals. Our goal was to have the highest audited NotesBench measurement in the world. We then set our sights on more than 5,000 NotesBench mail-only users audited by the time Lotusphere 98 rolled around last January in Orlando. Some said we were crazy; we proved them wrong.

After we reached that goal (ahead of schedule), gaining 5,000 users wasn’t that interesting anymore. So we raised the bar. People thought we were even crazier, but we knew our platform. We knew our 64-bit RISC processors. We knew our fully enabled 64- bit operating system. And we’d come to realize the AS/400 subsystem architecture was the perfect fit with Domino’s multiple partitioning. So we aimed for 10,000. At Lotusphere 98, we announced that we have cleared that bar and gone over the top. A NotesBench audit

completed this January showed 10,400 active NotesBench mail users running for over 18 hours error-free, until we brought it down in a controlled manner. Even with such a high volume of users, we improved on the measured response time. On the 6,400-user competitive system (the highest NotesBench audit until the AS/400), the average response time was a very respectable 500 milliseconds. On our test with 10,400 AS/400 mail users, our average response time was 90 milliseconds—over five times faster. Not only that, but the CPU utilization during the AS/400 audit was less than 60 percent!

The Real World

But, hey, these are just benchmarks. What does that mean in the real world? Back in Rochester, the MIS department is switching over to AS/400s for Domino. As you might imagine, we’ve got a pretty big site, and we do a lot of mail. Previously, we had Domino servers running on 12 Intel-based systems—six with four-way processors. The point is, now we’ve consolidated those 12 systems into one AS/400. We’re running over 2,200 simultaneous, real, active Notes users all on that one machine. We route over 200,000 email messages per week on one machine, with lots of system left over—the CPU utilization is less than 30 percent.

Integration

The third reason Domino for AS/400 is such an extraordinary product is integration. Integration means freedom from creeping cost—because you have everything you need right up front. Integration also means that the whole system works well together—in a consistent, reasonable fashion. The AS/400 provides this. But there’s much more to integration than just the AS/400. We discovered that the integration of the AS/400, in turn, made for a powerfully integrated Domino for AS/400 product.

If we look at most other platforms, we see Domino applications on one system and the mission-critical relational database on another system. The goal is to run a light workload on their database machine, in an attempt to minimize the chance that their mission-critical data could be held hostage by a system crash.

But with the AS/400, we want you to use the full power of a single machine. We want you to load it up and use it for multiple purposes—including mission-critical applications, data, and Domino—all on the same system. That’s integration.

With everything on one system, you are opening the door to more opportunity. We designed Domino for AS/400 to maximize that opportunity. For instance, on competitive systems, in order to access and update the data that resides in a relational database, you need to get your hands on an ODBC driver. That can add cost and complexity. It is something that most certainly needs to be configured and available all the time. Because of this, your access to relational databases is limited in availability and performance.

The most popular multiuser database in the world—DB2/400—is fully integrated within every single AS/400. Because of this integration, you have direct, immediate access to it from Domino through the use of the Domino @DB command functions and script command LS:DO. (Direct access means no ODBC driver, no configuration, and no limitations. When you install Domino on the AS/400, your access to DB2/400 is already there and set up for you. That’s simplicity through integration.)

We are also releasing Lotus NotesPump along with Domino for AS/400. AS/400s house a huge percentage of the business world’s electronic data. When you pull in a collaborative application like Domino and a data access application like NotesPump, the possibilities for sharing all this data around the world are tremendous—with no programming needed!

The integration doesn’t stop with the database. For example, how do you like to administer your Domino server? Through a Notes client? Or with the AS/400 user

interface? With Domino for AS/400, you have both options. Then there’s email. On the AS/400, an Anymail framework allows you to send and receive email from many different sources. The SMTP MTA is plugged in to that framework, therefore extending the reach of Domino email. Not only that, but for those customers who have kept all their email addresses in our AS/400 System Distribution Directory (SDD), we’ve made it simple to manage the directory along with the Domino Name and Address book, through our Directory Synchronization function. If you update your AS/400 directory, your Name and Address book gets updated in real time. If you update your Name and Address book, your AS/400 directory gets updated.

Last, but certainly not least, is the AS/400’s world-class security. With the tight integration between Domino and OS/400, you may want to protect your AS/400 Domino server from the Internet. For that, try using our Integrated Firewall product. It’s simply an IPCS that can be plugged into an AS/400—allowing you to deploy all of your confidential Domino applications with complete safety. With other platforms, you will probably buy a system for your confidential relational database, another for Domino, and yet another for your Internet firewall. With the AS/400, you need to deploy only one system.

Now, that’s powerful! You have a complete, simple, totally integrated solution to fill any need you have—and it all plugs into one AS/400 system. That’s why I say it’s black and white. The AS/400 offers industrial-strength server power, and Domino constitutes the premier groupware, Web, and messaging product currently available. Together, it’s the easiest to deploy solution in the world. Systems administrators and IS managers will love it!