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GroupWise Stubbing: What it is and why you need it.

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12 June 2008 - 10:03pm
Submitted by: richardbliss

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If you use GroupWise you already know that it is more stable, more secure, and costs less to run than Microsoft Exchange.

To compensate for its inherent instability, Exchange has something called stubbing that is being introduced soon into GroupWise.

What is Stubbing?

The concept of stubbing is to show an email present in your inbox but have the actual email content reside outside your email server.

Exchange introduced that due to Exchange's inability to handle large amounts of data in its message store. Now GroupWise to increase the already massive amounts of data that GroupWise is able to handle.

I'm doing some research on Disaster Recovery for GroupWise. The survey I'm conducting can be found at https://vovici.com/wsb.dll/s/10c1eg337c3 if you are interested in participating.

From my preliminary data, 20% of GroupWise shops have Post Offices over 250 GB in size. That is a massive amount of data being stored within the GroupWise post office.

What Stubbing will do, is allow a large portion of that data to be moved to a 3rd party archiving solution that utilizes the stubbing feature, such as Retain from GWAVA.

The end user will not notice anything different. ALL of their email appears to be still in their client but what is actually there is a stub, only a short pointer that is pointing to the 3rd party database that hosts the enterprise archive. This way, a post office with 250 GB can move the majority of its data to an Enterprise Email Archive yet still keep all the email present in the end users mailbox. The GroupWise post office is reduced dramatically in size, making backups easier as well as improving overall performance.

Stubbing, it is good for you and it is good for your GroupWise. Coming soon.

To read my personal log visit http://gwbliss.blogspot.com

Richard Bliss


Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.



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FlyingGuy's picture

Not sure I like this,,,,

Submitted by FlyingGuy on 13 June 2008 - 11:29am.

I am leery of this technology, not because I don't understand it, its a fairly simple process, but what concerns me is recovery and data corruption.

When the information is in the GWDB, unless REALLY goes bad, the worse you end up with is all a clients email in one folder.

Now if the GWDB has simply a pointer to another DB how can that be resolved/reconstructed if something goes south in the other DB?

How does the GW client know the data is stubbed? Is the pointer to the stubbed data in the GW DB or is it stored elsewhere? If it is stored elsewhere how will Webaccess know about it?

Unless it is stored in the GWDB I am really not interested because it will have to be stored in some adhoc file someplace and this brings on nightmares about PST files and the like.

Nice announcement but how about some technical detail, because unless I trust it, none of my clients will ever see it.

- Bill

RogerIThomas's picture

Just a general comment

Submitted by RogerIThomas on 14 June 2008 - 4:28pm.

Bill/FlyingGuy, don't forget that Richard is talking from the point of view of a thrid party vender, just because Novell has opened up a new interface for advanced tools to be intergrated with its not going to force everyone to use it.

Richard has focussed on one of the weaknesses of Exchange in so much it tries to hold all messages in a SQL database. Groupwise already provides what I guess would be called local stubbing as each user has their own database which uses independent files for larger messages and search indexes so you don't see 200GB data files.

The tools Richard is talking about will meet the needs of certain clients for the rest we have things like DBCOPY and the current GWTSA (not sure of its name) which will still do the job.

As for your question regarding Webaccess and GW client, stubbing will only break the GW client in direct file access mode where it expects to access the underlying file structure. All other access modes (Web, IMAP, GWIA, Client over TCP/IP and SOAP) go via the PO so stubbing will be handled via the PO.

Roger

rellner1's picture

Coming soon, eh?

Submitted by rellner1 on 16 June 2008 - 1:26am.

So is this part of GroupWise 8? Not heard of this as a new feature so is this going to be a patch at some time after GroupWise 8 is realsed?

Also, any chance of stubbing support for GroupWise 7?

(Glad to hear this is being introduced BTW!!)

adolnicar's picture

GroupWise stable?

Submitted by adolnicar on 17 June 2008 - 1:13pm.

I can just smile while reading this statement: "If you use GroupWise you already know that it is more stable, more secure, and costs less to run than Microsoft Exchange."

We have problems with GW 7 stability on OES Cluster for more than a year now. Now we have second Technical Support Incident (which are not for free) - still no success...

It is sad for me, that I have to write this - after almost 20 years of working with Novell as partner...

Anonymous's picture

GroupWise Stable?

Submitted by Anonymous on 13 November 2008 - 12:50pm.

over 20 PO,. over 10 Domain, 2 GWIA. 7 clusters OES1 Linux. Stable as a frozen lake.

dnicoll's picture

Some more info

Submitted by dnicoll on 18 June 2008 - 3:31am.

So just to address some of the comments and provide a little more detail.

Stubbing is coming in Bonsai/GroupWise 8 - no plans for retro fitting to GW7 sorry.

Stubbing has been developed jointly with Messaging Architects who actually demo'ed this at BrainShare.

There are many reasons why organisations choose to use 3rd party archiving solutions such as GWArchive (improved storage management, email retention, compliance, Discovery, etc.) and this feature is primarily an enhancement for them - if you have some reason to not want to use a 3rd party archiving solution then you won't need to use stubbing - although you should maybe revisit why archiving solutions are of benefit - you may be surprised at some of their advantages.

As for DB resilience fears - unfortunately the GW DB isn't always as robust as you may have experienced. There are many organisations out there that have run into issues with large PO dbs, so don't assume that the GW DB=good and other stores=bad. Not all archiving solutions are database based either.

As for PST like scenarios - stubbing works with centralised archiving solutions not personal archives stored all over the place so those types of worries are unfounded also.

My final point would be that stubbing certainly won't be for all. Even those that use a 3rd party archiving solution won't all necessarily want to stub their archives. But for some it will be a great feature, making user access to archived mail seamless.

ybiloque's picture

Short comments

Submitted by ybiloque on 20 June 2008 - 5:53am.

These last years I see more and more customers using email archiving for legal aspect and to go away from local user archives (GW archive or PST).
Stubbing is a way to provide user with access to current and old content without overloading the messaging infrastructure (GW or Exc) and to allow web access to all content.

I have also a question regarding the stubbing.
How this aspect will be integrated withing the GroupWise indexing for stubbed content?

ybiloque's picture

Indexing

Submitted by ybiloque on 20 June 2008 - 5:55am.

Some of you have an idea about the integration of the stubbing and the indexing?

dnicoll's picture

Indexing with stubbing

Submitted by dnicoll on 6 October 2008 - 6:36am.

The indexing of archived materials is the responsibility of the 3rd party archiving solution which you use in conjunction with stubbing - e.g M+Archive from Messaging Architects.

When you need to search items in the archive which are stubbed, the POA will send a request to the 3rd party stubbing agent, the 3rd party solution willl perform the search using it's own indexes and return the results to the POA to be served to the client.

I hope that clears things up for you - and apologies for not getting back sooner.

Anonymous's picture

GW Stable and Resilient?

Submitted by Anonymous on 13 November 2008 - 8:38pm.

You bet.
If you have had the experience of being an admin for GroupWise, Exchange, and Notes, as I have, you would know that GW beats them both hands down.
My last position (for 6 years) had Exchange 5.x-2000 (which forced us to implement AD - what a nightmare when you are used to a real directory\meta-directory like NDS/eDirectory), and it had critical calls opened at least twice a month. Downtime averaged >48 hrs/month.
That was for about 2400 mailboxes. They had the luxury of being able to delete accounts when users left.
Additionally, users mailboxes were limited to 250MB, and attachments to 25MB!
I currently am one of 3 admins for a 19000 active mailbox GW 703 system.
Oh - by the way, the 3 of us, plus 1 other - 4 in total - also support 85 Netware/Linux OES servers for Novell file/print/provisioning/DNS-DHCP/ident mgmt and more, plus email litigation discovery archive requirements, 21 SANs, the Novell and GW clients... and 400+ Blackberry devices!
The Windows AD group is twice our size with 1/2 the servers and no client worries; client side is a 3rd group with 16 people- Did I mention we also have to maintain 37000 inactive GW/eDir accounts?
Our unplanned downtime in the last 32 months has been slightly < 13 hours, a bit more than 9 of which was due to a careless electrician, and almost 3 of which to the local utility. Also, 15-25 minutes or so was due to me (opinions vary, grrrrrrrrr ), mistakenly downing the main GW domain rather than our lab domain with fat phinguhs. Supposedly mine. GRRRRRRRRR!
But anyway, GW 7 performance also kicks Notes and Exchange butt, and from what I've experienced GW8 quadruples the advantage.
So, all you MS Kool-aid drinkers, go ahead. You've been fooled, just like you were when you voted.

ssalgy's picture

Who are you? Let's chat

Submitted by ssalgy on 20 November 2008 - 4:23pm.

I love your comment, and would like to learn more about your experiences. Could you email coolguys@novell.com and mention that you are the guy with the allegedly fat phinguhs. I think your story would make a fascinating article.

--Susan

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