Saying that diskless PCs will make fileservers irrelevant is the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
> Did everybody catch MSFT's announcement on their NetPC yesterday?
Yeah, it was funny to see them admit that NCs are "okay" after all. Didn't they spend all of last year saying that the NC concept would never take off? That customers wanted more not less, etc.? It's obvious that MS is scared big time. It's hilarious watching them squirm.
>The impact of this next wave of computing will certainly translate
>into smaller and fewer netware licenses.
You've said this before David, but you're missing two very obvious points that go against your thinking:
1) Diskless clients need file storage for the documents and data that they manipulate.
In this light, NetWare has the best server technology and products for this market. They support more platforms than any other vendor (from OSI to AppleShare to NFS to SMBs), and they have the most mature and most robust technology, especially in terms of security and performance. Both of these aspects make me think that NetWare has more of a future in this area than ever before.
As desktops took more of the focus, NetWare lost some of it's impact, but as the network becomes the focus, products like IntranetWare will become the most important components on the network. Imagine having your users in NDS and your Java applets in NAL. All you do as an administrator is drag-and-drop your users onto the application that you want them to have access to, and you're done. The app shows up on their desktop (with all inherent security rights in place), and your users have secure, reliable, fast access to the application and their data files.
NO OTHER VENDOR OFFERS ANY TECHNOLOGY THAT IS ON THIS LEVEL!
2) By incorporating these technologies and packaging NetWare as the "Best" server for NCs, they get to leverage their installed base. All of those corporate sites that are looking to move to this kind of model are going to be looking at maximizing their investment. Novell offers the best ROI, and the best preservation of existing investments.
This combination means only good things, especially when NCs are put into the mix.
Rather than NCs being the death of NetWare (which is an asinine, unfounded assumption at best), they will make NetWare all the more important. |
