David: >>You can quite nicely manage a network without NDS, <<
You can manage without but why would someone who wants to save on network administration, servers, and user frustration really want to ?
Read the example below to see what I mean.
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novell.com
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"Fluor Corp."
From refineries in Saudi Arabia to power plants in Indonesia, Fluor Daniel manages projects on a global scale using NetWare 4.1 to connect its employees around the world.
For a global competitor such as Fluor Daniel, project management means making sure a very large team -- sometimes spread across several continents -- is productive and has everything it needs to meet the client's requirements every minute of every day. That's project management on a global scale.
When Fluor began migrating its mainframe environment to a Novell network in the mid-1980s, it made the first step toward providing its
production engineering and support personnel with the best communications tools available to achieve the company's planned expansion into new markets.
In the past ten years, that growth has exceeded expectations, and Fluor Daniel has grown to be the largest engineering and construction firm in the world, according to Engineering News Record magazine.
"The Challenge"
The project-oriented nature of Fluor Daniel's business takes people out of their offices and into other Fluor Daniel locations on a continual basis. And each person on the team, regardless of location, needs to have access to central data such as engineering specifications, standard operating procedures, engineering practices and other reference material.
With more employees working on more projects, in more offices around the world, the Novell network that had served Fluor Daniel so well was stretched to its limits. Additional Compaq servers constantly who needed it, no matter which office they happened to be working in at the time.
"There was so much confusion that people weren't getting the information they needed to do their jobs," recalls Say Lim, director of infrastructure for Fluor's Central Information Services. "We created multiple log-ins for those who spent a lot of time traveling to other locations, but it was really just a BAND-AID* for a growing problem." About the same time, Fluor was running out of connections on its servers in virtually every office around the world. The Houston office network, for example, had already grown to 40 servers to support its nearly 3,000 users. Some users had to login to four or five servers before getting to the information they needed. In addition to the obvious inefficiencies, these multiple server logins were creating a drain on the system, resulting in poor server response for everyone.
"The Novell Solution"
After studying the specifications, attending briefings and setting up a live test network that spanned offices in four North American cities, the standard server team proposed that Fluor move ahead to NetWare 4.1. The advances capabilities of Novell Directory ServicesTM NDSTM) were a critical component of that decision.
"With the centralized administration and 1,000-user capability that NDS gave us, we could consolidate servers and handle the concurrent logins to alleviate the poor server response," said Lim. Two years later, the 4.1 migration is nearly complete, with only the European offices remaining to be upgraded.
"NetWare 4.1 gave us the ability to assign everyone within the Fluor
organization a single login ID that could be used from anywhere on the
network," said Lim. "We've eliminated the confusion and provided the users with a common interface they can depend on, wherever they happen to be working at the time."
"Benefits"
Fluor Daniel employees who travel to different
locations can expect the same familiar user
interface to access the network, wherever the
project takes them.
The centralized administration and 1,000-user
capability of NetWare 4.1 and NDS let Fluor
consolidate servers and alleviate poor server
response.
No matter which project they are assigned to,
Fluor Daniel workers can access specific central
engineering resource data for that project from any
of the company's more than 50 offices worldwide.
Novell and NetWare are registered trademarks, and NetWare 4.1 and Novell Directory Services (NDS) are trademarks of Novell. All other brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
The Fluor Corporation logo is a registered trademark of Fluor Corporation |
