10 Great Reasons to Choose Domino on Solaris

Lotus

10 Great Reasons to Choose Domino on Solaris

1. You'll be in good company
Businesses in all manner of industries and market segments are relying on the Domino server and Notes client for Solaris SPARC and Intel Edition. Canadian Tire Acceptance Ltd., BCTEL Advanced Communications, the Hawaii Department of Education, Springfield College, Sun Microsystems and Lotus Development are all doing it. Applications range from sales force automation to project management to Web site management to 'Net commerce and more.

2. Performance and scalability
Performance is the name of the game when it comes to servers, and nobody does it better than Sun Microsystems. Just look at the benchmarks. Sun servers have consistently placed among the leaders for Notes and Domino server performance.

Sun servers scale from A to Z. Buy the system that meets only your immediate needs, or one that anticipates future growth. The same concept applies to Domino, which can help businesses scale from private Intranet to public Internet applications with a single architecture for both. You can start an Intranet pilot and be comfortable knowing the same infrastructure can extend to meet the needs of a future Internet initiative. Your investment is leveraged.

3. Cost-effective
In today's cutthroat marketplace, reducing your cost of ownership is not simply a choice -- it's a business necessity. Domino on Solaris for SPARC and Intel Edition is an excellent way to achieve this goal.

The scalability and flexibility of Sun servers helps protect your investment in technology while allowing the freedom to grow and modify your infrastructure as conditions demand. You can enjoy unparalleled price/performance now with a smaller server, and upgrade later for significant yet cost-effective growth.

Likewise, as a recent independent study points out, Intranets based on Lotus products show "significant advantages in the areas of deployment time, personnel requirements, manageability, and information sharing... [and the] cost per site to purchase the hardware, software, and integration services of the Notes intranet server is nearly half that of other Web server products. These data imply a strong cost-of-ownership advantage for Lotus."**

4. Reliable and Secure
Sun products are designed with the reliability, availability and security demanded by mission-critical applications. It's what Unix is good at, and the Solaris operating environment is among the world's most mature and proven Unix implementations. And it's why so many customers have insisted on Solaris SPARC and Intel platform editions for their relational database servers.

Domino, too, provides industry leading reliability and security. The Domino security model provides user authentication, digital signatures, server-to-field level access control, and encryption. Security enables you to extend your intranet applications to customers and business partners. Plus, the new Domino Advanced Services are designed to satisfy even the most demanding information and/or telecommunications provider, with fault tolerant storage, recovery mechanisms, server clustering with real time replication, dynamic load balancing and server partitioning.

The Domino 4.5 server is also closely integrated with the Solaris operating environment for SPARC and Intel, taking advantage of native Sun fault recovery, event logging and high availability features. These features are designed to ensure highly reliable access to data, better server uptime and an easier job for the network administrator.

For example, administrators now get a single event tracking environment for both Domino and the Solaris operating environment for SPARC and Intel. Likewise, the fault recovery system enhances reliability and automates the process of system cleanup, restart and diagnostics in the event of a Domino server fault. The administrator can completely customize the response to a Domino server, including integration with Sun's logging and debugging facilities.

In addition, Lotus and Sun are working together to provide high availability for Lotus Domino for the Solaris operating environment. This joint development includes Domino integration with Solstice HA software, the high availability products and technologies from Sun for enterprise management. Today, Domino 4.5 supports automated hardware failover through the Solstice HA 1.2 product.

5. Highly manageable
Both Sun and Lotus offer powerful tools that simplify management in today's heterogeneous environments. Sun-based system administration software helps to easily and quickly manage central and remote servers with automated diagnostics, trouble reporting, capacity planning and configuration management capabilities.

Similarly, Domino helps simplify your administrator's job through the use of a single, consistent set of object services for everything from mail to calendaring to workflow and custom applications. This makes it more manageable than other solutions that have a greater number of servers to implement and support, inconsistent sets of services across servers, and require significant integration effort in building solutions.

Enhanced integration between Domino and the Solaris operating environment for SPARC and Intel also simplifies management by minimizing the number of environments in which an administrator needs to work.

6. Interoperable and open
Sun has long been an advocate and leader of open systems and standards in the business environment. Lotus, too, is open to both Internet and "de facto" standards, including TCP/IP, POP3, SMTP, HTTP, NNTP, MAPI, CMC, X.400, Java and -- very soon -- IMAP and LDAP.

Sun and Lotus recognize that customer sites contain a diversity of systems, hardware and software, and that this infrastructure represents a significant investment. That's why we're committed to an open, integrated approach to business solutions, including cross-platform availability.

Java, of course, permits true "write once, run anywhere" programming. The Solaris operating environment is also cross-platform, running on both SPARC and Intel-based servers and workstations. The Domino 4.5 server and Notes 4.5 client run on all major platforms and network operating systems; Domino is also designed to integrate seamlessly with other information sources like relational database and transaction processing systems, mainframes and the Web.

Together, Domino and the Solaris operating environment for SPARC and Intel support multi-vendor interoperability and resource sharing, so customers can leverage existing as well as new investments in information technology.

7. Flexible
In this rapidly evolving world, flexibility is a critical character trait of IT systems. With Sun and Lotus, you get a wide array of modular, flexible and customizable options. The Solaris operating environment runs on a variety of workstations and servers, including Sun SPARCstations and Intel-based PCs. Sun hardware ranges from low-cost and low-maintenance JavaStation^TM network computers to powerhouse Sun Ultra Enterprise datacenter systems. Just browse the Sun Web site to witness the diversity of Sun software -- from HotJava^TM to the Solstice family of products.

Domino is also a highly modular solution. While each Domino server includes mail routing, calendaring, agent, bi-directional replication and other seamlessly integrated services, customers can easily enable or disable the services of his/her choice. In this fashion, customers benefit from the lower costs, faster development, and simpler implementation and support made possible with a highly integrated product -- while at the same time enjoying the flexibility of a highly modular system.

Integration of Sun's Java technology is a key component of Domino's flexibility. Today, the Notes 4.5 client supports Java applet execution, and the Domino 4.5 server can serve pages with Java applets and Internet scripting languages such as VBScript and JavaScript. Moving forward, Domino customers can look forward to even greater integration with Java technology.

And don't forget our 16,000 Lotus Business Partners. These third-party vendors can assist you with plenty of off-the-shelf and/or customizable Domino-based solutions and services, many with sophisticated integration of the Java technology.

8. An industry of third-party providers
When you choose a solution from Sun and Lotus, you're really getting a solution backed by Sun, Lotus, and an entire industry of third-party vendors. That's because we practice our Working Together(R) creed, partnering with other hardware, software and service providers. Our goal is to ensure that customers get the best solutions for their enterprises -- based on standards but custom tailored to meet unique business needs.

Lotus, through its Lotus Business Partner program and Sun, through its Internet Associate Program, have each created an infrastructure designed to foster customer success. The Sun/Lotus Alliance team leverages both programs to cross-train and support mutual Sun/Lotus partners. The result is a solid subset of Sun/Lotus specialists.

9. Service and support
At Sun and Lotus, supporting our customers and partners is a top priority. We offer on-site service and support 24-hours a day, 365 days a year, worldwide. Lotus and Sun also participate in a Cooperative Technical Support Agreement (CTSA) that enables SunService and Lotus Customer Support staff to open service calls within each other's support organization. This single point of contact offers mutually entitled customers a better way to achieve problem resolution.

10. The Sun/Lotus Alliance
In 1989, Lotus chose the Sun Solaris operating environment for SPARC as its first UNIX port. Since then, our partnership has been going strong, focusing most recently on meeting customer needs in the enterprise and Internet/Intranet space.

Lotus products for the Solaris operating environment for SPARC and Intel include the Lotus Notes 4.5 client, Domino 4.5 server, Domino.Applications, NotesPump data distribution server and more. Lotus and Sun/JavaSoft also work closely together in the development of Java applets and applications. Lotus products making use of Java technology range from the Java-enabled Domino server and Notes client, to a set of business productivity applets and desktop for NCs previewed at Lotusphere '97.

Sun and Lotus share dedicated cross-company teams that work closely together to advance the R&D, marketing, sales and support of our joint initiatives. We also share engineering teams, equipment and resources, ensuring that our customers get the very best in enterprise and Internet/Intranet solutions.

*UNIX Systems Market: 1996 Year in Review, Jean S. Bozman, IDCFLASH, 12/96.
**Lotus Notes and the Intranet: A Comparative Analysis of Leading Web Server Vendors, Business Research Group, 8/24/96, pg. 2.