Domino 8.0.1 plans to deliver some great new capabilities to help reduce  your database sizes.  We'll be introducing new database compression technology in 8.0.1 that could provide a huge reduction in database sizes - email and applications. This extends the template or design note compression which was added in 8.0 to all non-summary data in a Notes application file.

Our initial lab performance tests using live mail files are showing an average savings of approximately 40% in storage space! The exact savings you should expect to see will depend on the content of an individual database. In addition, we are seeing further I/O reductions from this with no measurable CPU usage increase. This reduction is IN ADDITION TO the already lower I/O that is enabled with Domino 8.0 (We will be blogging about and posting the 8.0 performance gains results very soon).

This compression effort had originally been planned for delivery in Domino Next release, but the results of the work were so significant that we wanted to get this benefit in the hands of all customers as early as possible.  The setting to enable compression in 8.0.1 will be configurable, so you do not immediately need to convert all servers or DBs to the new compressed format.

We will publish  more details of our final test results as we move this capability into the Domino 8.0.1 shipping code  - 8.0.1 and this compression capability is due to be available in Q1 2008.

This will provide yet  another truly compelling economic reason to upgrade to Domino 8.x.