Sunday, March 10, 2013
EPA Migrates 25,000 Lotus Notes Mail Files to Office 365...Without 14 Years of Historical Data?
http://gcn.com/articles/2013/03/08/million-message-mailboxes-complicate-epa-move-office-365.aspx
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was a Lotus Notes shop for about 15 years until their very recent move to Office 365, facilitated by Microsoft and Lockheed Martin. Lynn Singleton, director of environment services for Lockheed Martin is featured in the article and provides much insight into the rapid migration schedule along with some of the struggles and successes.
A couple of things stand out in this article. I've highlighted text for effect.
"But an unexpected hurdle was the size of many of the mailboxes that needed to be transitioned, which forced EPA and Lockheed to rethink how to approach the migration midway through the project."
The EPA "'didn’t have a size limit on mailboxes to trigger purging or archiving of information. Some of the larger mailboxes had over a million objects in them. In all, the mailboxes contained a very large universe of information, representing about 90 terabytes of data,' Singleton said."
"Initially, EPA wanted to transition all of the mailboxes along with their information to the cloud. 'But the throughput requirements of that, just the physical constraints, were such that we could not do it,'
"If the team proceeded as planned there would have been network latency problems. Plus, the team determined that they could not handle the quantity of information with the migration tool they had selected."
How did they solve the problem? Well, it looks like they only migrated some of the data.
"So the team weeded out mailboxes with large attachments and archived legacy information that was older than a year."
OK, so they've got one year of live data in the cloud? If that's the case is the other fourteen years of data existing within Lotus Domino databases on EPA servers? Do EPA employees use Lotus Notes clients to access their mail archives? What about the custom Lotus applications they have? They aren't mentioned in the article. I ask because the EPA had, as of 2010, twelve Domino servers labeled as "Lotus Notes Application Server" in this document. It would be nice to know if they have plans for those.
I've sent a note to the author for clarification.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Wait. They didnt know they had 90tb of Notes databases before they started?
ReplyDeleteAnd thats an average 3.6gb per client? Those aren't huge numbers.
They figured this out HALF WAY THOUGH?
Oh dear.
---* Bill
In most other jurisdictions there would be a law suite with "professional negligence" on the top sheet.
ReplyDeleteNeither Microsoft nor Lockheed Martin are companies that employ idiots, and I can imagine that none were involved in this. But it does seem an odd tack to take, it must be said.
ReplyDeleteWhen things are opaque like this, it's usually a good indicator that not all information is at hand to make a rational justification of the conclusion. And I suspect that not all information would ever be published, it being confidential between MS, Lockheed Martin and the customer. So I guess we're all left looking at the conclusion, wondering how on earth someone could get to *there* from that starting position.
I've got to admit, I'd love to know (if for nothing else to re-establish my basic faith in humanity), but I can imagine that'll never happen (for both good and bad reasons).
Oh well, we shall just have to speculate wildly ;)
---* Bill
"Neither Microsoft nor Lockheed Martin are companies that employ idiots"
ReplyDeleteNot true, my ex-wife remarried a guy working at Lockheed-Martin here in Ft Worth, and he was an idiot. :-) She left him just a year after getting married, partially due to him being stupid, she said he was draining the intelligence from our son... LOL