Lotus and IBM at Lotusphere, the company's annual conference.

ORLANDO, Florida -- Lotus and International Business Machines yesterday announced the release of Domino/400 at Lotusphere.

This is a native Lotus Notes Domino server running on the AS/400 platform. The AS/400 is an ideal platform to run mission critical applications like Lotus Notes Domino. Messaging is increasingly one of the most critical services in corporate Bermuda. The AS/400 offers incredible scalability while offering a reduced total cost of ownership, meaning businesses can support more users on fewer servers with a reduced cost per seat.

The entry price for a server supporting more than 100 users is just over $10,000 in the US. This same machine could scale to support more than 250 users. The basic cost of the hardware is about $100 per user. Although these prices will be higher in Bermuda, the basic premise is the same. This is a very inexpensive cost per user and it is well within the realm of the PC architecture.

What is more exciting is the scale that these machines are going to be able to size to. I saw a single uni-processor machine running six different instances of the Domino server on the same machine. With a multi-processor machine this technology will allow Domino to scale to 10,000 users on a single AS/400.

In practical terms, this means bigger offices like the major banks or Government could install a single AS/400 to support their entire Domino environment. This kind of scalability has never before been reached on a client-server-messaging platform.

Asked what the key advantages of the AS/400 server platform would be, William Zeitler, General Manager, Server Brand Management, said: "One big advantage will be the scalability. In Rochester we have a single machine supporting 2,200 users.

"AS/400's are easier to deploy, easier to manage, effectively reducing the total cost of ownership especially in the small to medium business market.'' For hard-core AS/400 users each Domino server integrates as a subsystem. The Domino server is configured using the command CFGDOMSRV, and then a series of very familiar Notes install questions comes along asking the standard "Is this the first server in domain?'' type of questions a Domino installer would be used to. There was a command prompt area that allowed for a domino administratorto execute standard console commands like "show tasks'' and the expected results occurred.

Domino/400 also offered an auto-restart feature. Most Domino server problems can be fixed by exiting the server task, and restarting the server. On most platforms this requires manual intervention, and on Windows NT it often requires a full operating system restart.

Terry O'Brian, one of the IBM developers working on the Domino Project said: "Our system will be able to recover itself from the majority of errors that occur on the Domino server without manual intervention. In our testing we have had servers restart themselves and the Notes Administrators were not even aware it had happened until we read the log.'' For uses with legacy data on an AS/400, Domino will be the way to extract it and manipulate it. Users will be able to treat data in DB2/400 as if it were standard external data. The demonstration that I saw it was tightly integrated and very fast. It will be very easy for Domino developers to access legacy AS-400 data, and to send new data to the AS/400. You can expect the next user interface for the AS/400 to be Domino. At least two vendors were showing pre-release software that was formerly NT based but had been ported directly to DB2/400. They were accessing hundreds of rows of data, and it was going back and forth to DB2 very quickly.

Domino/400 is a product that integrates tightly with Lotus Notes, while having the reliability, and scalability of an AS/400. Domino for the AS/400 will be released at the same as V4R2 of the operating system OS400 that will be released in late February. V4R2 is required to run Lotus Notes Domino.

Paul Ryan of Bermuda-based Paragon, who is attending the conference, said: "I am so impressed with Domino/400 that we will have to strongly consider using it for our mission critical Bermuda Connect product.'' Expect great things from Domino/400 in Bermuda due to its Increased reliability with fewer servers, and a messaging system that integrates easily with legacy data while leveraging current AS/400 skill sets.

BUSINESS BUC