As we get closer to migrating from Lotus Notes/Domino to Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, I’ve started researching some migration tools. Recently, I had the opportunity to test Quest’s Notes Migrator for Exchange. Although I’m not happy with the time it takes to migrate the data, I do like this tool. In Quest’s defense, I suspect the time it takes to migrate the data is more a problem with the amount of data and my current configuration.
The Quest tool is installed on my laptop and I ran a test against a 5.5GB mail file. The first time I ran the migration, I pulled the data from the Lotus Domino server in a geographically remote location to a PST file on my local hard drive. The remote site is connected by a point-to-point 45MB dedicated link, but the migration still took 5 hours and the resulting PST file was 7.5GB. I later ran a similar test on the same mail file, but instead of using a local PST file for the destination, I directed the mail straight to the Exchange mailbox. This process took 9 hours and 15 minutes. The “size” of the mail file on the Exchange server was 6.8GB.
With over 4TB of data to migrate from Lotus Domino, I’m a little worried about the time and amount of additional drive space needed. I have talked to Quest, and I realize we will get more data throughput by migrating multiple mail files using several threads and even additional migration workstations.
I hope to review BinaryTree’s tools soon. In particular, we plan to test the application tool which will allow us to slowly replace our Lotus Domino applications. More on that later.
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