R6 on Windows 2003 vs. AIX

HCL Domino Domino Forum
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We are a Windows shop that runs AIX solely for Notes. For a variety of reasons, I’d like to move the Notes infrastructure to Windows as well, and would like some supporting documentation for this to present to my management. Our user load can easily be handled by either environment, so performance is not a factor. Does anyone have documentation that would support a business case to move to the Windows platform? For example, data indicating that X% of companies that have R6 run it on Windows would be great.

Thanks,

Mike

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Subject: R6 on Windows 2003 vs. AIX

I have a lot of experience running on those two platforms running side by side. I’m going to take the sometimes unpopular position that Win32 is far superior for running Domino for a number of reasons:

Why I like Win32 better than AIX for Domino:

  1. Easier & cheaper to find staff that is experienced in Win32 &Domino than AIX & Domino

  2. While it might be argued that AIX as an OS is more stable than Win32 Domino is no more stable on UNIX than on Windows. I manage 6 AIX mail servers each with about 1200 users on them and DOMINO crashes just as much or more than on my Intel servers (I think more)

  3. Support is inferior for the UNIX platforms from Lotus. I have called with AIX specific bugs and the support person was unable to replicate the problem because he didn’t have an AIX test bed readily available.

  4. Cost. Just look at notesbench.org to get a comparison of per user cost.

  5. I hate to be the first one to have a problem, in other words I want to be on the platform that the most people use. I do lots of presentations on Domino to large groups and I usually ask what platform everyone is running on. Usually I find that about 30% have some UNIX/iSeries/s390 in their environment but everyone has Win32. I have had devistating problems with ND6 on AIX that were AIX specific. Particularly a problem with IOCP that crippled an environment for days. We were the first organization to have the problem which was later fixed in an APAR.

I could go on and on. Good luck getting hard deployment percentages from IBM. I don’t suspect that they will be forthcoming.

Good Luck,

Rob Axelrod