Lotus Nut

Actually, you may want to consider running this on your servers this weekend if you haven't already implemented DAOS. Get it out of the way... :)

load compact mail -c -ZU - While you're at it, throw in the -v -n switches too to enable body and design compression. And make sure that you've enabled these settings in the advanced properties tab of the templates so that the compression options do not get turned back off by the design task.

You should no longer use the -ZU switch at the same time that you use the -daos on switch. This will make sure that all of the attachments are converted to the LZ1 compression algorithm prior to enabling DAOS. IBM has also recently released Technote 1411563 with information on how they also have changed their recommendations. There is a specific SPR DROO7XBS9B that addresses a specific daoscat issue with doing this in 8.5.2.

Or: Can I DAOSify a Server With < 8.5 Clients?

Recently I have had some colleagues and clients asking about updating a Domino Server to 8.5 and turning on DAOS while still running a mix of 6 and 7 Notes Clients. There is some confusion related to some upgrade seminars that are happening that appear to be using this slideshow. Here is slide 18 that is causing some confusion:


The last bullet is causing confusion. Of course "Domino 6 and 7 clients will not recognize DAOS" - even the 8.0.x client would fall into this category as it was released pre-DAOS - DAOS is a server feature. However, there are no known problems with using an older client against a DAOSified mail template. Here is why: the Domino Server is aware of DAOS. Any requests for an attachment from clients, servers, or services such as BES will be honored by the Domino server sending the attachment. The server will still have to get the nlo file and serve it to the requesting client (or server) over the wire. And, if you are running local replicas it does not matter either because the replica will be pulled down with all attachments inside the database.

Do I recommend a long-term strategy of having 6 and 7 clients with an 8.5 server? Negative. But you can immediately reap some benefits by upgrading your server and enabling DAOS while you are working on your client rollout strategy. And, as the slide above states, you'll need to wait until the clients are upgraded before you can update the template to mail85.ntf. Finally, DAOS is not just for mail databases. I have also sensed some confusion around this. Of course, in most environments, the mail store is where most databases would have duplicate attachments (either internal or shared) and most of DAOS's storage and i/o savings has been revolved around mail files.

Hopefully this helps!

In response to: Concerns over DAOS Estimator?

Just a note - I have seen what Vitor is referring to in his comment on my initial post and have verified that there are cases where if the file name is the same as well as the size reported in the DAOS Estimator report that the files are treated as the same object by the Estimator. But after enabling DAOS on the database and compacting it, the two attachments were treated as separate objects by DAOS even though the tool did not see them as different. This means that you may save less space than the Estimator thinks due to some edge cases where you may possibly have attachments with the same name and physical file size but with different internal data. In Vitor's case with auto-generated files, the results may be very skewed. Again, each environment is different and ymmv. IBM is already aware of these findings above. :)

Paul Mooney reminded us the other week that we should do this - and I agree! Over at Vaughan Rivett's blog, he's discussing some of the misunderstandings surrounding DAOS. He brings up several good points, but does question whether DAOS should be enabled on mail.box files. Of course, each situation may be a little different for every environment, so it's up to you to determine if you want to do this. But keep in mind that, like Vaughan states, DAOS is for any application - not just mail!

If I'm a daosified mail user and am using a CRM application to save a copy of an email message directly into the CRM, then if DAOS is enabled for the CRM application the attachment will be shared in DAOS! But if I want to send that email to a colleague and mail.box doesn't have DAOS enabled, then that attachment will be written to mail.box and then when it's delivered to the recipient's mail file DAOS would associate it as a duplicate from my mail file. But, if mail.box has DAOS enabled, then the attachment will never be pulled back out of DAOS (meaning there will not be the disk i/o associated with the transaction) and the router will know that it already existed in DAOS and not try to pull it back out. So, in most cases you will want to enable DAOS on your mail.box files. (Of course multiple server hops will not be aware of this currently, but for mail users on the same server it should be ok.)

Also remember that you'll need to enable transaction logging on your mail.box files. This may mean that you will need to disable the notes.ini settings for MailBoxDisableTXNLogging=1 and/or RM_NO_LOG_LARGE_OBJECTS=1. You will also need to manually enable transaction logging on the database with the router off by using load compact -T on each of your mail.box files.

Yesterday in the Twitterverse, there were some concerns over whether the tool is accurate. I decided to do a quick test. I did notice today that there was a v1.2 of the DAOS Estimator Tool released on February 19, 2009. So I ran the latest version of this tool on a single database and I can see where the concerns may be coming into play.

The concern was that the Estimator Tool was only looking at the file name to determine if the attachment was a duplicate. Here's what I did to test this concern:

• Created a new mail file
• Created 2 draft messages that had the same attachment (attach.ppt) that was 699Kb
• Created a 3rd draft message with an 880 Kb attachment (also named attach.ppt). This was a completely different file from the start - it just has the same name.

The results were right in the main file analysis section - you can see that it saw 3 files in the DB with 1 duplicated file resulting in 2 DAOS files. So far, so good. But the problem is with the section I have outlined in red below. As you can see, there are two lines that have the same text ("Total Duplicate Attachments found"). This isn't right.



I went back to review some previous results (gathered from v1.1 of the Tool) and can see that the second line should really be "Total DAOS Eligible Attachments" (see image below). This explains some of the confusion with the above image. Using the wording from below in the results above, this is right. There's only 1 attachment that's duplicated but 3 total attachments that will be moved over into DAOS.



I've reported this to IBM, so hopefully this wording will get corrected in a v1.3. I think we can feel safe that the Tool is working just like DAOS will work in properly determining if an attachment is really a duplicate or if it just has the same file name. Though I certainly welcome any feedback otherwise!

Several people have been blogging about using the (now-corrected) DAOS estimator tool. Feel free to add your savings calculations as a comment here or post them on your own blog!

Bruce Currier should be saving 49%!!
I had someone ping me with his results of saving 39%!
The third comment at Ed Brill's post on the Estimator tool reflects a 40% savings!
Almar Diehl blogged his results and will be seeing around 17% savings.

As demonstrated above, your mileage may vary with the savings...

A commenter at Bruce's blog (linked above) also noted that if you currently use a service to backup your mail databases offsite, then you should also be able to save a lot of money since you will be backing up much smaller NSF's.

And speaking of backups, make sure that you review the Backup and Restore considerations for DAOS!

Are you curious to see just how much space you will save with DAOS? Well, first of all, you do know what DAOS is, right? If not, here is some information.

IBM has released a tool that will analyze a set of databases you specify and compare the duplicate attachments to let you know how much space you can save after enabling DAOS. Here is a document on how to use the tool. And here is another document with the information on how to download the tool. The tool can run against 6.0+ servers.

So....how much will you save?