Who's got the best OS? Find out at
NW Showdown
By JOHN FONTANA
Network World, 05/03/99
LAS VEGAS - Imagine that your various operating
systems could really talk with one another while sitting
together in your data center.
Would NetWare and Unix berate Windows 2000, the
new kid on the rack? Would Kid 2000 fire off insults
to the old stalwarts? And would Linux tell all three to
stuff it in their closed-developercommunity ears?
Might be fun to listen in, huh?
Well, the next best thing is happening next week at
NetWorld+Interop 99 here. Technical experts from
Mi-crosoft, Novell, Sun, The Santa Cruz Operation
and Red Hat Software will face questions from each
other, audience members and a group of experts as
part of Network World's Operating System
Showdown. The presidential-style, take-no-prisoners
debate is sure to provide insights not typically found in
vendor white papers.
In all likelihood, there will be more than free T-shirts at
this event. With the recent surge in interest in Linux, the
resurgence of Novell and the release of the third
Windows 2000 beta, there should be enough fodder
for a verbal rumble.
Net administrators are loading up their questions,
including those that cover integration, strengths and
weaknesses of each system, total cost of ownership,
standards and API support, uptime benchmarks and
security.
Jean-Marie Chanoine, a senior software developer for
Framework, in Tarrytown, N.Y., wants to know what
the vendors are doing to improve total cost of
ownership, including costs for staff, hardware and
software, and how the costs stack up against the
competition.
Arthur Bommele, a senior system engineer for a
consulting firm in the Netherlands, believes no single
vendor is capable of solving every operating system
issue a customer encounters. So he wants to know
what vendors are doing to facilitate integration in
multisystem environments.
A host of network administrators submitted questions
to Network World. They are inquiring about operating
system support for such things as TCP/IP, Lightweight
Directory Access Protocol, Common Object Request
Broker Architecture, Extensible Markup Language,
HTML and management protocols, such as SNMP.
And some administrators wonder about whether
operating system APIs are open or proprietary. They
also raised questions about the kind of work vendors
are doing to improve APIs.
......
nwfusion.com
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