Well as far as "connected DOS" goes IntranetWare provides seemless, transparent connectivity for NT, Win 95, Unix, OS/2, Macintosh, web/Java clients and oh yes, even DOS for anyone who remembers it! Through NDS it provides management features way beyond Microsoft's own, even for NT, plus full SFT III (patented) fault-tolerance. Which history books have you been reading from?
<How is Netware going to stand up against clustered, symmetric multi-processor NT?>
Very well as it happens, SMP is part of IntranetWare and it can support up to 32 processors (hardware depending) this not only adds processing HP but also improves networking performance because IntranetWare LAN drivers can be serviced by processors other than processor 0. GroupWise and the New Web server v 3.0 are also "SMP aware", as well as 3rd party application servers such as Oracle 7 and Notes 4.
NT indeed supports SMP, though it has been shown that it does not scale very well and has problems going past 4 Processors, it has been shown to actually slow down with more than four processors.
Clustering, well it's part of the published product roadmap for MOAB and due for release next year. You can see it demonstrated next spring at Brainshare 97 and there will be some features which will really amaze everyone!
I guess when you talk about NT clustering you are talking wolfpack, wolfpack 2 to be precise as wolfpack 1 is a poor attempt at SFT3 where two servers share the same disk-array. Wolfpack 2 is an MS and other partners' proprietary clustering solution (Tandem?). It is not an off the shelf solution and you are tied into h/w purchases.
<The distributed aspects of NT> What! there are none, I believe MS demonstrated their DFS in a sneak preview of NT server v5.0. It sounded cool ! A global look at the file system on the network from a central point until that server running the DFS failed ! No distribution + No redundancy = No fault tolerance. Additionally, Novell Replication Services is in beta and due for release real soon, providing an NDS-managed fault-tolerant "virtual file system" between several servers.
Any way this is supposed to be stock BB not a suitable place for a Holy War... anyway isn't your Nose Hurting Yet ! <g>
ADE. |
