Since about April of this year, IBM has offered a VMWare solution that runs in a virtual machine on the Lotus Foundations Appliance. Depending on the application, this may be all that is required. It really depends on the requirements of the application and the user activity on the server as well as the host processor, memory and disk space. If you just need to host terminal server to provide RDC for a few remote clients and QuickBooks for a few staff members, they should run just fine in that environment. Put shared data on the Lotus Foundation network file shares and it will be backed up to the integrated intelligent disk backup (idb) that uses hot-swappable hard drives so you can store copies of critical data off-site to avoid losing all your data in the event of a catastrophe (fire, flood, theft, hardware failure …).

Having said that, I have never sold Lotus Foundations but remain curious about it. I’m surprised that my fellow HTG’ers are unfamiliar, as our HTG sponsor (IBM) had it on display during our January meeting. Like I said, I’m not selling it but it is a very compelling offering that I certainly wouldn’t dismiss.

I have no idea if IBM is having much traction with this product or not, nor do I really know how well SBS 2008 is doing…but I do respect both Microsoft and IBM and will continue to watch and learn about Foundations. I appreciate the VarGuy’s apparently-unbiased coverage that provides a great place to learn. Thanks, VarGuy!

Erik Thorsell
Success Computer Consulting – Minneapolis, MN

Trust me on this… if I’m pitching a Lotus Foundations box going up against another partner pitching a SBS server I will not loose. I have way more margin to play with on Lotus Foundations. For those that are just learning of Lotus Foundations in this thread… suggest you get up to speed fast, this is a game changer.

Still, you need to be educating customers about the solutions you recommend — regardless of the supplying vendor. If somebody builds a better mouse trap, would you keep selling the old mouse trap?

Not saying that’s the case with Microsoft vs. IBM/Lotus. Just food for thought.

Daniel Bombard
Systems Admin
Yuma Office Equipment

The Lotus Foundations Appliance includes everything required to run a small business or non-profit organization in the box. That includes backup with hot swappable hard drives. The entire OS in Flash (updated via a 3 minute download)

Dual WAN ports for automatic network failover. Combined with built in Dynamic DNS with a private multi-DNS server network for customers, an ISP failure is automatically detected and the backup ISP is on line automatically. No separate router required or maual effort required. Lotus Notes replication allows you to continue to work remotely with no VPN required or even off-line.

Lotus Notes is an application development environment. There is an entire world of apps hosted on Notes and the databases it can replicate to client systems. It isn’t Outlook and Exchange. It is different. But get some facts.

Five years ago we put our small business on the forerunner to Lotus Foundations and found it much easier to manage than SBS (which we removed to make way for the appliance then known as the Net Integrator running Nitix).

With the autonomics built into Lotus Foundations, deploying a new service like ftp is a single click. That starts the service, opens a hole in the firewall and registers the DNS name. Add user access to ftp with another click.

It’s not for everyone, but it works well for a number of organizations in the under 100 user environment and when you start pricing all of the features versus a Windows-based system, you’ll spend less to acquire a Lotus Foundations Appliance and spend less to maintain it.

And to your point about Open Source: Our resident blogger is still waiting to see a true open source alternative that’s widely considered a head-on rival against Small Business Server. No doubt, Linux and LAMP have server momentum — but not really in the classic small business market.