Daniel Nashed's Blog

Domino Storage optimization -- why are there still customers not leveraging the full potential?

In the context of Domino Backup I am looking again into storage optimization.
There are many different ways to backup Domino databases.
One of the most advanced option is to leverage a snapshot vendor solution.

For a snapshot reducing the NSF storage and moving all data out of the data directory, which doesn't need a snapshot backup should be clear to every admin.
But storage optimization best practices are beneficial for any server and also for run-time performance.

It's still not clear why so many customers are not taking all the benefits from storage optimization Domino offers.

I looked back into a presentation I did in 2008 when Domino 8.5.x introduced DAOS and I copied one of the most essential slides.

Here is a very quick summary of storage optimization benefits without going into too much detail.
All the functionality is easy to implement and I really don't see why it's not used more.

What is missing to get more admins implement all of it?


-- Daniel


Design compression

• Reduces 50% of the design.
• Enabled by default on mail templates but needs to be applied on older databases manually.
  

Data compression

• Reduces 50% of the notes data (basically everything that is not an attachment).
• Enabled by default on mail templates but needs to be applied on older databases manually.
  

DAOS

• Usually more than 70% in databases are attachments.
• Moving the attachments to DAOS allows incremental DAOS backup.
• NSF is reduced by 70% and backup, compact and other operations greatly benefit in performance and backup storage costs.
• Deduplication safes 30-35% of storage on attachments on average on top of that!
  DAOS T2 could be used to offload older attachments to cheaper storage if needed.
  
  

NIFNSF

• Moves NIF data from the database to a separate NDX file which can be also stored in a different file-system outside the data directory.
• Up to 10-15% less storage needed in NSF.
  

FT Index moved to a different directory -- specially important for snapshot backups

• You can move the FT index to a different disk so a snapshot backup would not backup that storage.
• Sometimes moving FT is also helpful to avoid increasing your NSF file-system.
  

DBMT

• The database maintenance tool is designed to perform all maintenance operations on databases.
• I still see that most customers use compact -B to maintain databases.
• DBMT has many advantages including pre-allocating required disk space and allowing the file-system to align the file on disk properly.
• The compact is a copy style compact and should be performed at most once per week.
• The servertask is the recommended way to maintain your databases!

For snapshot backup for sure you want to split data from from index to avoid taking a backup of index data.
But also for standard backup you greatly benefit form storage optimization outlined above.

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