Picking Up Speed
The dark horse in the race is Novell, which claims its GroupWise messaging system is picking up market
share from the cc:Mail installed base, especially among companies that run cc:Mail on its NetWare
operating system. The company said last week that it has sold 2.5 million GroupWise licenses this year,
bringing its total installed base to 13 million.
Last week, Novell shipped GroupWise 5.5, which adds document management, calendaring and scheduling
enhancements, and native Internet addressing. Meijer Inc., a $7 billion grocery chain in Grand Rapids,
Mich., will roll out the package to 16,000 users by year's end. Previously, the company used IBM's Profs,
and it considers the GroupWise feature set a good replacement. "GroupWise provided for 98% of our needs
right out of the box," says Jason McLellan, team leader and technical specialist at the company.
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he solution includes IBM Corp. Netfinity 3000 servers, Digi International's Digi Datafire Sync/570 adapters
and Novell Inc.'s BorderManager FastCache and is available as a single-configured SKU for under $6,000 to
the end user.
The solution is significant for Internet service providers (ISPs) and Web enabled businesses, said Roy
Appelbaum, Tech Data's vice president of networking product marketing.
"The solution is an optimized server that allows a corporate intranet or the World Wide Web to have very fast
access and improved performance time," he said.
The solution lowers bandwidth costs as an alternative to upgrading overburdened servers, said Patrick Harr,
FastCache product manager at Novell.
He said caching eases traffic by allowing only the first user demanding a page to go to the Internet for the
data. All other users get the information from the local system, where it was stored after the first user's
request. "It brings the data closer to the user and gets rid of bandwidth bottlenecking. The next user receives
the information at LAN speeds, as opposed to Internet speeds."
The Netfinity 3000 server has an Intel Corp. processor and customers can configure the solution for Unix,
Windows NT or NetWare networks.
The DataFire adapters connect the server to Frame Relay and leased-line services at T1/E1 speeds without
requiring a separate router.
The BorderManager FastCache software can process 4,055 hits per second, or 350 million a day, said
Mindcraft Inc., a research firm in Los Gatos, Calif.
The customer controls the amount of time the information is stored, said Harr. "FastCache reads that
time-to-live tag, and when it's expired, the next user goes out and refreshes it." He said dynamic information,
news updates and stock quotes for example, are not stored locally, but other data like background art is
cacheable. "Ninety-percent of the data you find on the Internet is cacheable."
The solution is more than just throwing three products together, said Bill Oakes, Novell's director of alliance
marketing. "Anyone can go out and buy an IBM server, a Digi card and FastCache and throw all together.
But they need to know what they're doing. This delivers a complete solution. It's pure plug-and-play.
Customers overwhelmed with network meltdown are looking for something to bring in that they can turn on
and have up and running right away."
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