Thursday, September 09, 2010

So You Want DAOS?

With the published and experienced benefits of DAOS, more and more customers are looking to implement.  With DAOS, you will see significant reduction in storage.  We have seen as much as 1/3 of the storage used by Domino eliminated.  What DAOS does is remove the attachments from the NSF files, placing them in encoded (or encrypted) stores on the file system of the server, and leaves references to the files in the header of all Notes Documents referencing the attachment.  The process of deduping is much more efficient storage of attachments, and by it being part of the ODS, it is faster and more transparent than any other method to achieve this available to this point.  DAOS, however, has some requirements that can not be ignored.  You must upgrade the ODS of your databases and enable transactional logging before DAOS.
If implemented correctly, transaction logging can improve server performance and even help with system recovery/startup time/backups/etc.  IBM has compiled documentation relevant to transaction logging that I feel is a must read for anyone looking to implement DAOS and/or TLogs.
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27009309 - Best Practices
Of particular note, given the popularity of SAN storage... is the section related to TLogs on SAN:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27009309#SAN
If you have not already reviewed the DAOS best practices, here is the WIKI article:
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf/dx/daos-best-practices
I know in the past, IBM has made suggestions for storage on a Domino server that may have been seen as overly engineered or complex for the audience.  I have seen this personally as well, but this time, it is not the case.  These practices for storage, if ignored, can lead to severe performance degradation or system instability.
I hope this helps!

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