Domino on the iSeries Versus the Competition

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

When IBM completed its $3.5 billion acquisition of groupware software maker Lotus Development in July of 1995, it was pretty obvious at the time that the advanced groupware functionality that Lotus had created, thanks mostly to Ray Ozzie, was going to be the next big thing in commercial software. While that was a lot of money to spend for an acquisition at the time--and the most money IBM has paid for any company--I think it is safe to say that the Lotus acquisition has paid for itself, and the AS/400 and iSeries lines went a long way toward paying for it.

In fact, back in the fall of 1999, I wrote a story that said that the advent of Domino on the iSeries was a watershed event, one that had brought approximately $500 million in extra hardware revenue to Big Blue, which was peddling about $3.3 billion in OS/400 server gear at that time. Because Ozzie wrote Notes and Domino to run on Windows, the installed base of Windows servers running the Domino server utterly dwarfed the installed base of Domino on Unix and OS/2, the other platforms that were supported. You will remember that early users of Domino groupware at iSeries shops had to run the software on the File Serving IOP--what we now call the Integrated xSeries Server co-processor. Domino didn't go native on the AS/400 until March 1998, when it ran on OS/400 V4R3. During the summer of that year, as IBM launched OS/400 V4R4 and a new line of Model 170 entry servers, the so-called "Invader" boxes to take on Wintel boxes, IBM was going head-to-head pretty successfully against Microsoft's Exchange Server and Novell's GroupWise because of the advanced functionality that Ozzie had created with the Notes/Domino team. The combination of a large installed base of IBM customers--the AS/400 base, which numbered about 275,000 shops at that time--and the right product at the right time set Domino on OS/400 sales exploding. Most of those OS/400 shops had been listening to several years of hype about groupware, and now their preferred systems software vendor had it available on their preferred platform. And when IBM launched a small box, dubbed the "Bumblebee" because it had a yellow stripe on the front of the black AS/400 case, based on the Model 170s, customers could get groupware for a bit less money then they would spend on a regular AS/400.

IBM's pricing on the AS/400 and then the iSeries platform goes in and out of phase with the market and is driven as much by economics as by the steady increase in performance in the OS/400 server. Back in early 1997, the Notesbench Consortium was launched to track the performance and price/performance of Notes/Domino workloads. Through 1997, Unix and Windows platforms offered about the same bang for the buck on Domino email. By early 1998, Unix had the price performance lead, with Wintel servers costing about 1.5 times midrange Unix boxes running Domino email and OS/400 servers costing about nine times as much. Part of the reason why the AS/400 platform didn't do so hot was a matter of tuning; Domino was new on these boxes. Unix platforms stayed about the same through 1999, but Wintel iron got to be a lot less expensive and more powerful 400 MHz and 500 MHz Pentium II Xeon processors and cheap SMP boxes that were made from them. Windows NT 4 Service Pack 2 also helped boost performance. By the summer of 1998, IBM's AS/400 Division had closed the gap with Unix with the Bumblebee boxes even as Unix platforms got cheaper and more powerful, but Windows iron still delivered a NotesMark (a measure of performance used by the Notesbench Consortium, which is a number of transactions per minute a server can do running various calendaring and mail workloads) at about half the price. By the way, the Integrated PC Server kicker to the FSIOP beat the tar out of all of these platforms running Domino, costing about one-third to one-fifth the price of a full-blown Windows server. And the pricing on IBM's mainframes was way out of line. A System/390 9672 mainframe with 10 500 MHz processors could do about 42,500 TPM on the NotesMarks tests running Domino R4.5, but an AS/400e S40 with twelve 262 MHz "Northstar" PowerPC processors could do almost 36,000 TPM and did so at about a third the cost of a mainframe.

Performance and price/performance are only two factors in the server buying or server keeping decision, which is why expensive platforms persist. This is a good thing, because based on the thin data available for the modern iSeries, it looks like the OS/400 platform is once again out of whack with the rest of the market when it comes to running Domino workloads at competitive prices.

It is unclear what IBM is doing to make Domino more competitively priced on the iSeries platform. IBM used to have a low-end iSeries Bumblebee line that offered a few performance points, and then eventually it added a few bigger boxes for customers with larger Domino workloads. With the advent of logical partitions (also with OS/400 V4R4 in 1999) and its subsequent maturation as a technology and its relegation to normalcy in many OS/400 shops, customers are not as inclined to have a separate Notes/Domino box as they are to have a Notes/Domino partition (or partitions) on a much larger production machine. IBM, of course, loves this, since it gets to make fewer sales calls and has higher profit margins. But the whole practice of trying to compete directly with Wintel iron for Domino workloads seems to be over. With the i5 lineup announced last year, IBM only delivered an i5 550 with two processor cores activated as the i5 Domino Edition. The specs for that machine are below:

As you can see, this is not exactly an inexpensive solution, in that it supports 14,100 Domino Mail and Calendar Users (MCUs). Even if you assume that your Domino workloads are a lot denser, your users don't hammer their machines as hard as a benchmark test so this i5 Domino Edition can probably still support many, many thousands of real world end users at OS/400 shops. While it is good that the i5 Domino Edition exists, since the base hardware box plus maintenance is about 40 percent less expensive than a regular i5 550 server, the problem is this: Most iSeries shops don't even have 1,000 employees. This begs the obvious question: Where is the i5 520 Domino Edition? There is no such machine, of course. And I don't know what you make of this situation, but this doesn't make a lot of sense to me unless IBM has pretty much stopped trying to sell an iSeries directly against Wintel servers running its own Domino stack.

As far as I know, IBM is not offering special pricing on i5 partitions running Domino, either, but my advice to you is to suggest that any partition that you have that is running Domino is in effect an i5 Domino Edition and you expect a 40 percent discount on the hardware and software maintenance fees associated with that partition. Anything running Domino should have Bumblebee pricing, since IBM is the main beneficiary of your decision to keep Domino on the iSeries. IBM wants new workloads to move to the iSeries and stay on the iSeries, and this is exactly how it must pay to have those desires met.

There is a question as to whether or not a 40 percent discount is deep enough, however. Based on the relatively few Notesbench performance and price/performance results that have been published in the last 18 months, I would submit that it may not be. Take a look at this Domino performance and price/performance table, and then come back and I will talk about it.

In the table, the regular i5 520 Standard Edition server was run in a test by IBM using recent Notesbench R6 tests, which are based on the Notes/Domino R6 code base and include the Notes Mail test and the more dense iNotes test, which makes use of groupware functions as well as mail and calendaring. The Notesbench test does not have a lot of participants these days--basically, it comes down to IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard. IBM has also tested some i5 570s as well, but did not run tests on the i5 550 Domino Edition. For some reason, IBM hasn't run Notesbench tests on the prior iSeries Domino Edition machines, either. And for reasons that are obvious once you look at the Domino performance table I built, IBM has not provided pricing information for any machine that costs more than $500,000. The i5 520 machine IBM tested cost almost half that, and the other i5s IBM tested, as well as an iSeries Model 890 tested two years ago, cost millions of dollars. The i5s offer excellent scalability, but iSeries hardware and software pricing is not competitive, even after a 20 or 25 percent discount on the whole shebang.

But, I added the pricing information back in myself because we all need to know what it costs to run Domino on the iSeries. (And yes, for the record, this was a tremendous pain in the neck. I shaved 25 percent off the cost of the i5 570 machines in the table to get a rough reckoning of street price.) It is not entirely clear to me why IBM chose such heavy, expensive configurations to get its performance results, or why it chose to put i5/OS V5R3 Enterprise Edition with full Enterprise Enablement on the boxes, either. I was under the impression that Domino R6 didn't have to store its data in DB2/400, and even if it did, it did not require 5250 interactive processing capacity. I think IBM must have had these machines sitting around in the labs and ran the tests just to determine performance. If this is the case, this was not a particularly good way to make the iSeries shine. Not showing the price/performance makes it look like IBM has something to hide. I happen to think that with a little tweaking with the configurations, IBM could dramatically improve the bang for the buck of the i5 on Domino workloads. And someone ought to be ashamed for not having done that in the first place. I can understand why IBM might be hesitant to do competitive benchmarks when other vendors are not doing Notesbench tests as much as they used to. But that is still no excuse for setting up a configuration that, when the pricing information is added in, looks so bad. This is embarrassing, and it is not the IBM Rochester I know.

All I can say is that it looks like we are back at square one in early 1998, when Unix and Wintel boxes were offering considerably better bang for the buck on Domino workloads. IBM has to get in gear and make Domino on the iSeries more cost effective. The i5 520 was only tested on the Notesbench Mail test, something that HP and IBM have used to test the performance of their Linux and Windows iron somewhat sporadically.

The i5 520 IBM tested on the Notesbench R6 Mail test can't be tweaked all that much. But it looks a little heavy on the main memory, it is not an i5 Domino Edition, and it from two to three times as much as Windows boxes that have also run the R6 Mail workload. Cutting back the memory to 8 GB from 32 GB shaves $9,750 off the system price and chopping 35GB, 15K disk prices in half--$1,771 for this disk? That is crazy for a disk that costs less than $500 in single-unit quantities--would drop the cost of this i5 520 by close to $47,000 before the discount. That drops the price to just under $203,000 for this configuration. Now, let's add in the 40 percent "Domino Edition Discount" as I have suggested above for the hardware, and then add in the $2,290 cost of the Domino Messaging Server V6.0.3 license and the system console for $300. You're in the range of $123,350, and assuming the smaller memory doesn't decrease performance by all that much (and I think it will not), this i5 520 configuration I propose would cost about $3.30 per NotesMark TPM, not $6.69. The Wintel boxes running the same test are in the $2 to $4 per NotesMark TPM.

By moving to i5/OS Standard Edition, tweaking the configurations to be a bit less heavy on disk and memory, and cutting disk and memory prices, and then adding the 40 percent Domino Edition Discount, I think the situation for the i5 570 and i5 595 can be brought more into line as well on the R6 Mail test. But at $13.59 per TPM and $15.48 per TPM--that's after a 25 percent discount already--IBM is not competitive. The market can bear some premium for high-end machines--no question about it. But we are talking on the order of $5 to $6 per TPM.

On the R6 iNotes test, which is a much denser benchmark, the i5 570 that was tested running 16 Power5+ processor cores is again a bit heavy on the configuration, and in fact, does not appear to offer a price/performance benefit at all compared to an iSeries Model 890 with 32 Power4 cores. The i5 570 takes up less space, but it was configured with i5 OS/400 Enterprise Edition, and that is pricey, pushing up costs to nearly $87 per NotesMark TPM. A skinnier p5 570 configuration with half the cores running at a slower clock speed of 1.5 GHz only handled 14,740 NotesMark TPM, but it did so at a cost of just over $12 per TPM. An eight-socket, 16-core Sun Fire V890 box from Sun running Solaris 10 was able to do 21,904 TPM at a cost of $9.90 per TPM. Sun is setting the pace for midrange boxes with its new dual-core UltraSparc-IV+ processors. However, those chips run out of gas in the 12-socket, 24-core designs because Sun doesn't yet realize that it needs to add more Domino partitions if it wants to better scale performance. Sun will figure this out eventually. The Linux machines in the comparison are quite old, and I only put them in there to show you where the last generation of Lintel iron was. You can bet that with dual-core Xeon and Opteron processors, the Linux 2.6 kernel, and Domino R6, price/performance for Lintel and Wintel iron is going to get a lot better.

The heat is going to continue in the Domino market in particular and in the groupware market in general. The iSeries has chosen Domino as its enterprise-class groupware, and it has to compete. Period.

For all I know, what IBM is really trying to do now is get OS/400 shops to run Domino on iSeries partitions that are in turn running on Linux or AIX, which are a lot less expensive than i5/OS partitions because you do not have to pay $45,000 per processor core to activate an i5/OS license. If that is the case, then do some Domino benchmarks on the iSeries that prove that it can be more cost effective to support Domino on Linux or AIX partitions. Carve out 2-core, 4-core, 8-core, and 16-core partitions on the iSeries and price the box, taking out the cost of the i5/OS partitions that do not run Domino and proportionately spreading the cost of shared resources like power supplies, cables, frames, and disks. Make the case for the iSeries running Domino. Do the work and stop taking shortcuts, IBM.

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