Planet i

http://gcn.com/articles/2013/03/08/million-message-mailboxes-complicate-epa-move-office-365.aspx

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was a Lotus Notes shop for about 15 years until their very recent move to Office 365, facilitated by Microsoft and Lockheed Martin.  Lynn Singleton, director of environment services for Lockheed Martin is featured in the article and provides much insight into the rapid migration schedule along with some of the struggles and successes.

A couple of things stand out in this article.  I've highlighted text for effect.

"But an unexpected hurdle was the size of many of the mailboxes that needed to be transitioned, which forced EPA and Lockheed to rethink how to approach the migration midway through the project."

The EPA "'didn’t have a size limit on mailboxes to trigger purging or archiving of information. Some of the larger mailboxes had over a million objects in them. In all, the mailboxes contained a very large universe of information, representing about 90 terabytes of data,' Singleton said."

"Initially, EPA wanted to transition all of the mailboxes along with their information to the cloud. 'But the throughput requirements of that, just the physical constraints, were such that we could not do it,'

"If the team proceeded as planned there would have been network latency problems.  Plus, the team determined that they could not handle the quantity of information with the migration tool they had selected." 

How did they solve the problem?  Well, it looks like they only migrated some of the data.

"So the team weeded out mailboxes with large attachments and archived legacy information that was older than a year."

OK, so they've got one year of live data in the cloud?  If that's the case is the other fourteen years of data existing within Lotus Domino databases on EPA servers?  Do EPA employees use Lotus Notes clients to access their mail archives?  What about the custom Lotus applications they have?  They aren't mentioned in the article.  I ask because the EPA had, as of 2010, twelve Domino servers labeled as "Lotus Notes Application Server" in this document.  It would be nice to know if they have plans for those.

I've sent a note to the author for clarification.

Read the original at Steve Pitcher.