Novell Bets the Farm on NDS
Is Novell a NOS company or an applications company? Back in the
firm's ill-fated WordPerfect days, nobody really knew the right answer.
Today, Novell is both—but this time the glue holding everything
together is NDS. By moving it from the LAN to the WAN to the Internet,
Novell plans to become the world's favorite directory company.
“Directory and identity are just two sides of the same coin,” says
Novell CEO Eric Schmidt. “The question ‘Where do you want to go
today?' is the wrong one to ask about networks. The right question is,
‘Who do you want to be today?'”
At BrainShare—Novell's annual conference that was held in
March—Novell showed digitalme, a Java-based tool that gives
consumers single sign-on to multiple Web sites, plus extensive control
over what information they collect. To be released in open-source
format over the next few months, the tool employs Extensible Markup
Language (XML) to store objects in NDS directories.
Also demonstrated was NDS 8, which searched through a billion-user
tree—approximately 2Tbytes of data—and retrieved desired
information within seconds. “A billion is just the start,” Schmidt says,
noting that NDS will need to scale as users add more and more
properties to the tree, ranging from a new cell phone's IP address to a
UPS package tracking number.
NDS 8 is merely one aspect of Novell's “six pack” update to NetWare
5. Now being beta-tested, this includes a significantly improved
multiprocessing kernel, multithreaded Java, native Lightweight
Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) support, and more applications for
its graphical management console. It will also offer HTTP as a core
protocol, increasing the range of operations that administrators can
perform remotely. The 64-bit Novell Storage System file system
supports compression and offers volume sizes up to 8Tbytes.
Novell disappointed those who expected it to start giving away NDS for
NT. It doesn't need to, says Adam Smith, marketing manager, noting
that “the all-NT enterprise hardly exists.” That said, Novell will soon
offer a version 8-enabled version of NDS for NT that, since it includes
native graphical tools for directory administration and repair, no longer
requires a NetWare server.
Also at BrainShare was Z.E.N.works 2, a forthcoming update of
Novell's NDS-enabled, policy-based desktop management tool. New
features include the ability to push new software to desktops that are
unattended and not even logged in. According to Lubor Ptacek,
marketing manager, Z.E.N.works 2 is merely a portion of an overall
management platform—currently dubbed K2, and yet to be formally
named—that will be able to push service packs and other software
from server to server. Ptacek says K2's NDS-based configuration of
network devices, such as switches recently announced by Cabletron
Systems, Lucent Technologies, and others, will greatly simplify
network management.
Novell's GroupWise collaboration software is another piece of the NDS
pie. Tom Rhoton, marketing director, says planned enhancements
include “updating the Web access clients for increased speed and
functionality, plus adding Java applets to maintain state.” Rhoton adds
that Novell will leverage GroupWise's Web publishing capabilities in a
product code-named Magellan. This will be aimed at workgroups
whose members must maintain Web pages collaboratively.
Finally, Novell's Internet Caching System (ICS) combines the
disk-caching software from BorderManager with a file system that is
pared down for extra speed. Dell Computer and Compaq Computer
have both built ICS into caching appliances that can be run headless
and configured remotely. Although caching doesn't seem obviously
related to NDS, Steve Rokov, product manager, points out that “NDS
helps implement reverse caching, where you place the cache at your
ISP to speed access for remote users. Your actual Web servers can
be kept safely behind the firewall.”
To some observers, Novell's current success seems the temporary
result of Microsoft's inability to deliver. “I disagree with that premise,”
says Schmidt. “We are in the business of building a directory-centric
computing model, and right now there's no one else in that space.
Once customers deploy the directory, they are customers for many
years to come.” —Jonathan Angel
networkmagazine.com |
