Rudedog,
I have to give you credit that you were relatively objective on your last posting. Some points were inaccurate though.
You are correct that NetWare 2.X servers are non-Y2K compliant and Novell will not be putting out patches to make 2.X Y2K compliant (and there are very few 2.X servers out there anymore). But you incorrect about NetWare 3.X since Novell has make Y2K patches publicly available free of charge to NetWare 3.12. NetWare 3.11 and lower can upgrade to NetWare 3.2 which is Y2K compliant and adds a few minor features over previous versions. Novell has reported a substantial spike in NetWare 3.2 sales - a direct result of these older servers being upgraded.
You are correct the Compaq is one of Novell's largest resellers of NetWare. The President & CEO of Compaq recently acknowledged this strong relationship with Novell privately to all his staff via email. It was a very strongly worded email. And you do bring up an issue that Novell has with those selling an NT solution over NetWare. Because of NetWare's extreme system efficiency over NT, it requires a much smaller system resource over NT (there are many NetWare 4.x servers out there that can easily out-perform an NT OS on a large pentium system). Therefore - as stupid as it sounds - resellers and system integrators would rather sell an IT shop NT because they and the OEMs maek bigger sales.
The good news from Novell is - again this sounds stupid - that NetWare 5 requires a minimum pentium and 48MB RAM to run effectively (I have installed it on a 486 and 64MB RAM and its OK). this means a lot of system upgrade sales for the resellers, system integrators, and OEMs. The customer is the one that has lost out in this big money grab by the sales channels.
I agree with you that NetWare servers are still not accepted by the application developers that want to write custom application executables on the NetWare platform. NetWare 5 has done a lot to address the barriers that have restricted developers on NetWare. Novell has not abandoned the concept of bringing application developers. With NetWare 5 integrating an extremely fast open standards JVM, CORBA compliancy in the APIs, JNDI development integration into NDS, adoption of Oracle's OAS, a free Oracle 8 server licence and code, and development of a common API for many developer languages, Novell has gone very far in encouraging developers to consider NetWare as a platform.
Regarding TTS - you are correct and I agree with you there. I'm glad you clarified where in NT TTS like services are integrated. What I was referring to in TTS is that its API's were available for database programmers to perform explicit TTS requests to their database files. I also had to correct Keithsha on his incorrect understanding of what a TTS was in NetWare.
As for the Ring 0 - 3 debate. I would rather not get into that discssion. Leave it to say that there are big benefits to both Ring 0 and Ring 3 level applications. NetWare now allows an IT shop to choose. MSFT has stopped this battle of Ring 0-3 with Novell because it was shown that MSFT itself runs many of its services in NT at Ring 0. But since NetWare can operate in both modes, its not even an issue.
Regarding Clustering, I hate to burst your bubble on that one as well. Novell is releasing phase 1 of its clustering as we speak (this is to replace the previous versions of NetWare SFTIII). Phase 2 of clustering which will be capable of 32 processors/systems will be released sometime next year. All these releases are based on their Orion technology (previously name Wolf Mountain). There is no way they couldhave abandoned this since clustering is a future need for large scale enterprise requirements.
I will also disagree with you that F&P is a niche. The VAST majority of NT and NetWare servers are still sold to provide F&P type services and not for Application servers. This need will not go away in foreseeable future. MSFT has always wanted to downplay F&P as a legacy concept, passing fade, and a commodity. The real world is not proving this out. I live in the real world every day and 8 out of every 10 servers that my group installs for our customers are to provide a F&P level of infrastructure. So I will strongly disagree with you there.
But again RudeDog, I have to commend you for being as objective as you can be.
Cheers !
Toy |
