From Novell's Reality Check newsletter:
INTELSAT, the world's leading provider of international satellite telecommunications, recently made the decision to replace 62 Microsoft NT Server and LAN Manager servers with NetWare 4.1. "We were having enormous difficulty with our NT and LAN Manager network--servers were locking up daily, domains were an administrative nightmare, and we were having to manage too many servers," said Jet Guilaran, LAN Analyst with INTELSAT. "NetWare 4.1 offered what NT and LAN Manager couldn't--a hierarchical directory service that provides a single, central point of network administration as well as disk management and file ownership that has saved our company considerable time and money. And because of NetWare's performance and capacity, we were able to consolidate our 62 Microsoft servers down to just 16 NetWare 4.1 servers."
Intelsat is a telecom satellite consortium that provides telecommunication access around the world. It was established in 1963 and is jointly owned by more than 160 nations. Intelsat provides equal telecommunications access to all countries through a sophisticated network of satellites and earth stations.
As the telecommunications industry has become less regulated and the demand for services has increased, the competition to provide those services has also increased. As part of a retooling effort to meet the demand, Intelsat is revamping its network infrastructure by moving from Microsoft Windows NT Server and LAN Manager to NetWare 4.1.
Networking Requirements:
Intelsat has approximately 900 employees worldwide. The majority of employees are located in the Washington, D.C. office but a growing number of mobile salespeople are located around the world. Applications in use include common business applications such as e-mail, word processing, and spreadsheet. Large custom databases have been developed on Oracle for vertical applications. All client software for users is stored on and accessed from the network servers. Desktop operating systems and user applications are stored on the server to facilitate control and management.
Configuration Statistics:
The facility at Intelsat is physically organized around circular building pods. There are a total of 62 networks running fully routed IP over token ring. Two Wellfleet routers tie the network rings into an FDDI backbone. Most workstations are running OS/2 at the desktop.
Intelsat originally started with LAN Manager as the network operating system with a total of 63 servers. Microsoft NT Server has been gradually integrated into the configuration and at the point of migration, 40 NT servers were in use.
Migration:
In moving from Microsoft NT and LAN Manager to NetWare, Intelsat migrated all users, data, and applications to four Tricord servers running NetWare 4.1. All four servers will be used for file, print, and application servers and will have NFS capability. One of the four servers will also support a Macintosh ring. In addition, 12 specialty servers running NetWare will be installed for use as fault tolerant (SFT III) and data backup servers.
Why Intelsat Standardized on NetWare 4.1:
Intelsat decided to replace Windows NT Server and LAN Manager with NetWare 4.1 for the following reasons:
1) Easier administration
2) Single user account for entire network
3) Ablility to limit disk and resource usage with NetWare
4) Easier to determine and control ownership of files and directories
5) File recovery capabilities
6) Lower cost of ownership and administration
7) More powerful and comprehensive management
8) Lower hardware costs
9) Less hardware maintenance
10) Desktop management capabilities through NDS |
