Symetrik Domino Consulting

Posts Tagged ‘Outsourcing’

It’s been official for a few weeks: management has made a decision, certain user groups are overjoyed, the contracts are signed, and Microsoft is set to make a few million.

I work in an organization that uses Lotus Notes 6.5.x only for email. We are a commodities trading company with 2800 mail users in about 40 countries. We do not have a document management system in place, and many of our users send scanned contracts back and forth with other companies, which drives up the size of their mailboxes enormously. We currently have 1950 mailboxes that over 2GB (included replicas on hubs and cluster mates).

This is my first post on a series of posts that I will write throughout the course of the next 18 months on migrating from Lotus Domino 6.5.6 FP3 HF105 to Microsoft Exchange 2007.

To commemorate this first post, I have to refer to this link I stumbled on today from a slashdot article about the US State Department’s recent Email interruption. The post is called “Bedlam DL3, Me Too”. Very funny, and please note it is 2004. Don’t hate on MS too easily.
Read the rest of this entry »

We made the decision to roll back half of our hosted Domino severs from our newly outsourced hosted servers at our outsource facility.

Most of our servers are clustered, and we use clustering for fail over, not load balancing, so our odd number servers are primary, and even number servers are the failover cluster mates.

Since at our hosted facility, the production environment was down, and the disaster recovery site wasn’t being backed up, we wanted to fall back the even number servers to our original facility in-house. This way, at least we would have a backup, or fall back plan, if our servers went down again at the outsource facility.

First, we removed the machines from the cluster in the NAB. Read the rest of this entry »

Today just as I got into the office and started my daily grind, I noticed that my mail server had hung (ok, well not after I checked to see if 8.01 was out yet…as far as I know it will only be a few more hours).

So, then I stood up and told my co-workers who were starting to notice the same thing.

I then noticed it wasn’t just one server, it was all of our servers. Everyone started rushing around, and trying to figure out what to do.

You see we have just outsourced all of our servers to an externalized hosting facility two weeks ago. Last week, we had a similar outage from 12AM to 7:15AM, no patrol monitoring alerts, nothing. We had to rely on users in Brazil and America to let us know about the outage 4 hours after it was in effect. Our Inbound/Outbound Internet gateways, our central servers that act as relays for all internal mail (by design) and our POP3, Passthru, and Domino servers that serve all users who sit in sites that are not big enough to have their own server.

Quite alot of stuff to be going down for worldwide operations.

Today, it turns out that the SAN went down, so all servers that were connected to the SAN at the hosting facility were down. Read the rest of this entry »