Lotus Notes Network Compression
Lotus Notes Network Compression
10 sep 2006, by Wouter Aukema.
A study by Trust-Factory into Lotus Notes and Domino network and storage behaviour positively validates IBM’s claims with regards to potential network savings resulting from network compression in version 7.x
The study -which was part of a DNA assignment to compute the consolidation potential for servers within a multinational- revealed that overall effective savings on network traffic had been achieved of more than 38% after administrators had enabled network compression on all clients and servers.
The environment consisted of 5.435 active Notes users, whose demand characteristics can be described as follows:
In order to eliminate side-effects resulting from the holiday season, the bandwidth consumption levels were divided by the session concurrency levels in each of the two periods. The resulting network consumption per session, was taken as the basis for validation.
Also, the document read levels were divided by the levels of session concurrency. As the chart below shows, the resulting levels of document reads per session look similar for both periods. This is another indication that –despite holiday influences- the characteristics of end user behavior had not changed between the two periods.
The actual network resource consumption levels for both periods are shown below.
The high peaks occurring every four hours which you see in the blue line of June, were caused by some monitoring product. This was deactivated prior to the august analysis, following the recommendation from DNA. Besides eliminating the extraordinairy peaks, the general consumption of bandwidth usage has decreased with more than 38% due to the Notes Compression.