Lotus Notes has been a distributed application since its inception, and works well in most cases. However, the nature of Notes' constant and thorough database replication generates a tremendous amount of WAN traffic for remote users. Although the Notes application protocol is fairly efficient, the behavior of TCP combined with the high traffic causes the replication to slow down to a crawl in low-bandwidth, high-latency environments.

Steelhead appliances and Steelhead Mobile can be used to improve access to centralized Notes servers, or to dramatically reduce the time to update or back up your Notes database. Riverbed’s SDR technology eliminates all the repetitive bytes sent over the WAN. It also mitigates the effects of TCP slowdowns.

Riverbed was the first WAN optimization vendor to provide an application layer protocol optimization for Lotus Notes for both office and mobile workers, and it has continued to improve the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) to bring Layer 7 optimization to Notes and Domino.   The result is even better performance improvements for the sending of large email attachments with a performance gain of 8X to 25X. Riverbed also optimizes server-to-server replication, calendaring, and more. RiOS transparently switches off transport compression so Notes/Domino traffic for all applications can be more effectively optimized by the Steelhead appliance and Steelhead Mobile.

To find out more, download the Steelhead Appliance Lotus Notes Performance Brief and Steelhead Mobile Lotus Notes Performance Brief.