Hi Toy
Migrating to NT, eh? I'll believe it it when I see it. I worked for Dell for 7 months, finally got out due to the fact that a) I'm a software person and hardware is too dull. b) I was getting tired of pushing NT as a solution (that didn't work in most cases) when the company itself logged into a Novell 4.11 SFT mirrored pair every morning.
One of the problems that Dell had was growth in the user base. They tried NT but it didn't scale. (REPEAT, NT DOESN'T SCALE). It took me almost 3 months to get a domain login account, and when they finally got that sorted, two people appeared at my desk to make sure it worked, for half an hour! How expensive was that! I explained about NDS, TCO, ROI - nobody listened. The gods has decided that NT was the way to go so keep your mouth shut...
The big advantage of NT is that it takes a lot of hardware to keep running. I've done it myself (I'm sad to say) - "You'll need a Quad Xeon, PII server with 4Gb of memory, 100Gb of disk space and a damned quick backup solution to run this application" and that was the desktop environment! (joking, but not by much) Dell needs to shift hardware, if you start to talk about how 'lean' an OS is, the sales guys and the pre-sales technical guys would lose interest - they're not going to ship something that requires less RAM, disk and processor, the profit just isn't there.
Dell have their problem internally. As one of the support staff said to me before I left, "We're swapping one set of problems (NetWare) for a worse set (NT)", but nobody had been trained how to troubleshoot NT properly. The usual answer was to scrap the disk, re-install NT then reinstall the application in question (proxy, web server..whatever). This has happenned, I spoke to an IS guy in Dell about the internet, plus all the proxies etc involved - how did they insure that people didn't get to porn sites etc (I'm a BorderManager fan) - Answer - they didn't. The MS proxy went wrong and no-one could fix it so they turned it off and put the server on a shelf to be forgotten. How much did that cost? Who knows, as long as you don't record staff costs (which they didn't) and only look at the bottom line, it looks good. Apologies to anyone on this thread that works for Dell/Used to know me/Doesn't like my style of thinking but Dell's IT systems are seriously screwed up, and getting worse. If you want to know how good NT server is, ask an account manager with a customer on the line, a target to hit and a blue screen of death to contend with. No excuse.
Michael Dell's friends may own the OS, but by the degree of help we got, you wouldn't know it.
As I said before, if NetWare 5 needed huge amounts of resources, it would be more of a success, because that's what hardware folks want. If you start to talk about an OS that makes use of the kit that you've got, a la NW5, then hardware people aren't interested - they just don't move the kit as fast as they want. What to do - don't know. I got out, back to software. Dell is not the place for NOVL to go trying to generate business. They need to address the end user, plus impress on the reseller that NOVL software is the only way to go. If I were a customer (which I am now) I'd ask how much the server cost me to validate NT, then I'd use Linux with NW4 extensions from Caldera for a base OS - I know that way I'm not being ripped off. Dell? They have their own agenda - and it's not the 'thin client', believe me.
Regards
Peter
BTW How many Servers running NW do Dell have? If it's less than 3 zeros I'd be surprised. NT4/5 may be their choice, but their systems rely on NetWare. Remove that and Dell is a 'nomark' (local UK slang for 'nobody'). Game over - No competition. Next time you meet a rep from Dell, ask them, they probably won't know, but the answer will surpise you if you get one Think about it.
P |
