Consider the similarities between the plumbing in your house and the messaging system in your organization as your " information plumbing " - both are vital parts of their respective infrastructures without which life would be much less pleasant. Now, imagine the throughput of your home's plumbing increasing by about 40% every year and the ramifications of doing nothing to improve the infrastructure in a well-ordered and thoughtful way. Although not a pretty thought, that kind of growth is happening in many messaging systems.
One method to manage and plan for growth in messaging systems is through the use of a traffic analysis tool or tool suite. One such tool suite for Lotus Notes/Domino environments is DYS CONTROL! Version 3.9 and its Email Investigator component, introduced in late April by DYS Analytics.
Email Investigator provides messaging administrators with critical information about the operation of the messaging system through more than 80 standard reports, as well as, the ability to generate custom reports about messaging system performance. The information can be used to plan server and other hardware upgrades, server consolidation, and migration activities, as well as information to support daily management tasks. The tool also helps administrators to spot potential points of vulnerability in the messaging infrastructure that could leave the system open to denial-of-service attacks and similar abuse.
Another traffic analysis tool is MailEKG offered by MessageOne for Microsoft Exchange environments. Unlike DYS Analytics's offering, MailEKG is billed as a " messaging intelligence service, " not as a shrink-wrapped product. MailEKG collects information about messaging traffic patterns and analyzes the information to produce reports about system performance, how people use the messaging system, server loads, mailbox storage trends, and so forth.
The goals of any traffic analysis tool should be to cut costs through better planning of infrastructure upgrades and storage requirements, and to improve performance and service levels through better bandwidth and other resource utilization. Both of these tools aim to do just that.
We're fielding a very short survey on potential demand for such tools and growth of the messaging infrastructure in organizations. If you'd like to spend about 45 seconds answering a few questions, and getting the survey results in return, we'd appreciate your completion of the survey at:
www.ostermanresearch.com/survey_traffic01.htm
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Michael D. Osterman is the principal of Osterman Research, a market research firm that helps organizations understand the markets for messaging, directory and related products and services. He can be reached by clicking here.
Messaging archive
Past newsletters.
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Network World, 04/30/01
IBM wants Informix customers onboard
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