Stampede Regains Edge for Compression of Notes/Domino R6

by Alex Woodie

When IBM rolled out Notes/Domino R6, the software gained new compression and acceleration capabilities to give Notes users better response times and to speed database transfers. That wasn't good news for Stampede Technologies, which built its business on providing compression and acceleration for Notes/Domino with its TurboGold product. At Lotusphere last week, Stampede rolled out a new release of TurboGold that regains its edge in Notes/Domino R6 compression and acceleration.

TurboGold Enterprise Edition 3.0 is the newest generation of real-time compression and acceleration solutions for Notes clients and Domino servers from Stampede. Several new technologies make their TurboGold debut with TGEE 3.0, including a patent-pending technology called TurboStreaming, which Stampede originally developed for its new WebRider product, and which provides acceleration and compression for any Web application, not just Notes/Domino.

Gordon Dorworth, Stampede president and CEO, says TurboStreaming works hand-in-hand with compression and streaming replication technology already present in Notes/Domino R6 to makes data transfers even faster. Specifically, TurboStreaming works by opening multiple TCP/IP streams to allow the passage of large objects in such a way that's totally transparent to the user, Dorworth says.

Benchmark tests show that TGEE 3.0 and its TurboStreaming technology can significantly boost the bandwidth utilization of Notes/Domino, even with simultaneous use of the streaming replication and network compression that's built into Notes/Domino R6. According to a Stampede white paper describing the benchmarks and the results, TGEE compression is twice as effective as the network compression of Notes/Domino 6.5.3 on data that's highly compressible.

On data that is not compressible, such as ZIP files and MPEGs, TurboStreaming completes replications up to two times faster over a WAN and three times faster over a satellite connection, which has higher latency. In fact, the higher the latency between the replication, the more valuable the benefits of TurboStreaming, Stampede says.

Dorworth says TurboStreaming has given Stampede a lead in Notes/Domino compression that will not be surpassed by IBM anytime soon. "It will take a while, since we invented this stuff anyway," he says. "It raises the bar to next level."

In addition to TurboStreaming, TGEE 3.0 features new single multicating hub functionality. Stampede says that by employing a single multicating hub to simultaneously broadcast and update multiple databases to all spokes in an infrastructure, network traffic can be reduced by up to 1,000 percent or more, while considerably reducing the frequency of database updates.

Finally, Stampede's AutoZip Server Utility has been enhanced to record operational events into the TurboGold Statistics database, making the management of disk space conservation very simple, the company says.

TGEE 3.0 supports Lotus Notes 4.51 and later, including Lotus Notes and Domino 6.5. The TGEE 3.0 client runs on all Windows Millennium Edition, NT, 2000, and XP computers, while the server component will run on all Domino database platforms, including the iSeries.

TGEE 3.0 is available now and supports both client/server and server/server configurations. The client component starts at $55 per seat, while the Message Verifier component, which installs on a Domino server and is used for e-mail acceleration, costs $799 per processor. The Application Verifier is used to accelerate both e-mail and application workloads and costs $1,099 per processor, Stampede says.

Stampede also showcased its new WebRider software at the Lotusphere show. WebRider is a 64-bit application that runs on SuSE Linux and applies various caching, compression, and streaming technologies (including TurboStreaming) to accelerate Web applications. First released in November (see "Stampede's Web Performance Software Goes to Market"), the software works across XML, J2EE, and .NET applications.

For more information on TurboGold or WebRider, go to www.stampede.com.