Lawrence: Re: MOAB (everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask <g>)
Good reviews, but still the "nagging" ... well you know "nagging toothache". See how this reads to you
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Novell polishes crown jewel
Gives IntranetWare the resources to compete
where there was once little competition
By Michael Surkan, PC Week Labs
12.17.97
The first beta release last week of Novell
Inc.'s next-generation IntranetWare signals
the company's renewed commitment to its
flagship product.
Despite diversions down paths unknown in
the early '90s, IntranetWare (previously
NetWare) remains the jewel in Novell's
crown, the product that maintains the
company's presence on corporate networks.
Where other strategies have failed--from
super NOSes and desktop operating
systems to word processing--IntranetWare
has been the one constant in Novell's
strategic interests. PC Week Labs' tests of
the IntranetWare upgrade, code-named
Moab, show that now--at last--the product
is being given the attention and development
resources it deserves.
Unfortunately, it's coming rather late in the
game, and as the planned improvements to the next IntranetWare
release demonstrate, Novell is playing catch-up in many technological
areas it should have mastered years ago.
Luckily for Novell, however, its competitors have been slow to pick up
on the key IntranetWare hierarchical directory service technology that
has become the benchmark for network management.
With its NDS (Novell Directory Services), Novell has pioneered efforts
in industrial-strength directory services, giving it a significant jump on a
technology that its competitors are only now starting to learn and
implement.
Novell has introduced a bevy of products that leverage the simplified
management benefits of NDS. For example, Novell's BorderManager
may be just another proxy server (albeit a good one), but its ability to tie
into NDS endows it with an altogether more useful character.
In addition, Novell recently has been moving NDS to run natively on a
number of operating systems--if the client/server developers won't come
to IntranetWare for NDS, then NDS will come to them.
The relative advantage of NDS will slowly be eroded, however, as
major competitors start to implement their own directories, such as the
Active Directory in Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT 5.0 beta. And the
rapid growth in the LDAP interoperability standard may mitigate
Novell's attempts to encourage developers to tie their applications to
proprietary Novell technology.
Novell's recent decision to support Microsoft's high-level client-side
ADSI (Active Directory Services Interface) is an about-face policy
decision that demonstrates the difficulties that vendors have faced trying
to convince developers to use NDS.
Although IntranetWare has failed to catch the wave of client/server
investments throughout the '90s, Novell is now doing its best to regain
lost ground by skipping client/server altogether and appealing to intranet
development needs with Java.
However, it remains to be seen whether the nagging client/server
development problems with IntranetWare will continue to hobble the
NOS' strength as an intranet Java platform. The IntranetWare Java
Virtual Machine, for example, is at a serious disadvantage compared
with Unix and NT due to its lack of multithreading, which would let it
take advantage of multiple processors.
More important, if IntranetWare doesn't attract more of the back-end
client/server applications such as SAP AG's R/3 (where it is noticeably
lacking), it may find itself continually squeezed to the edges of networks.
If IS departments need to purchase Sun Microsystems Inc. Unix servers
to run their database systems, for example, they are more inclined to run
their Java middleware applications on the same Unix machines.
The Moab beta solidly attacks many of the problems that have kept
IntranetWare on the sidelines, providing Ring 3 application memory
protection (previous versions of IntranetWare implemented a
difficult-to-use memory protection scheme that few developers bothered
to use) and a simplified development environment with a single kernel
that supports both single- and multiple-processor servers.
However, Novell still has a long way to go to introduce rich C
development libraries and tools. Few third-party compiler vendors
(including Microsoft and Borland International Inc.) offer much help to
IntranetWare NLM programmers.
Moab: The beta that came in from the
code
Novell Inc.'s Moab is a curious hybrid in the realm of prerelease
products. PC Week Labs has run across beta products that seemed
chock-full of alpha code, but Novell freely admits that this IntranetWare
prerelease version is composed of both alpha and beta code. The
disclaimer notice burned into each CD stressed a beta emphasis on the
core server and client software and an alpha designation for
experimental code. In tests of Moab, most of the code--alpha and
beta--was functional. Following is a breakdown of where the code
stands in this release of Moab.
BETA-QUALITY CODE
Server operating system
Client support (Windows 95, Windows NT and DOS/Windows
3.1x)
CLIB and cross-platform developer libraries
Novell Distributed Print Services
NetBasic support
ALPHA-QUALITY CODE
Java-based DHCP/DNS servers and management utilities
Service Location Protocol
Novell storage services
ADSI provider for NDS developer support
Updated server management utilities
Updated NDS management utilities
HTML documentation
AVAILABLE IN THE NEXT BETA
Catalog services
WAN traffic manager
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Regards,
Joe... |
