A New Role NetWare
Workstation Manager boosts Novell's position in large NT desktop environments
By Monua Janah
Issue date: Jan. 20, 1997
The LAN of the future is taking shape--and it belongs to no single software vendor. Novell, with its widespread beta release last
week of a tool for integrating Windows NT desktops with its NetWare server environment, has taken a vital step toward ensuring
that it retains at least a piece of that future.
Novell's new tool, Workstation Manager, enables management of Microsoft Windows NT Workstations from within Novell
Directory Services (NDS). The product, one of several from Novell aimed at integrating NT within NetWare LANs, underscores
the new reality at Novell: If you can't beat Microsoft, coexist with it.
Workstation Manager also caters to an old reality among users: Don't sacrifice huge investments in IT infrastructure when you can
make do with what you have. Workstation Manager is designed to give users that option by letting them move to NT desktops while
preserving their installed NetWare base. Initial reaction from some large customers who have tested the product is positive.
J.P. Morgan & Co., which has standardized on NT Workstation for about 13,000 desktops worldwide, decided to implement
Workstation Manager and scrap plans to implement NT Server domains to manage desktops. "We architected an infrastructure for
our NT 4.0 Workstations to authenticate to," says Peter Sciara, a senior manager with Pinnacle Alliance, a consortium that handles
Morgan's IT infrastructure. "The solution gave us user mobility, security, and centralized management in a cost-effective way." Sciara
declined to estimate how much Morgan saved by not implementing NT domains.
NT's domain structure, in which several servers are grouped in a flat rather than hierarchical structure, is more difficult to configure
than NDS, is more hardware-intensive, and is more restrictive in the creation of user rights and privileges. Workstation Manager lets
NT desktop users sign on directly to NDS via network IDs and passwords. "Once that's accomplished, it will create an ID and a
password for the user on the fly for that workstation," Sciara says. "That means users can move around, and we can easily manage
IDs and passwords."
Morgan's decision doesn't preclude the New York bank from implementing best-of-breed server platforms as needed. For instance,
Morgan will still go with NT Server for applications. "We will continue to have a co-existence strategy," says Michael Reilly, the
Morgan VP responsible for desktop strategy. "We are committed to open industry standards and we will support only initiatives that
move us in that direction." Morgan has 600 NetWare servers and a smaller number of NT servers "in the hundreds," Reilly says.
Too Costly
Another large NetWare user, a financial services firm in Boston, also has decided to use Workstation Manager and NDS to manage
its NT desktops in a heterogeneous server environment. The firm has 130 NetWare servers, an IBM mainframe, several AS/400s
and Unix servers, and about 20 NT Servers.
The firm, which is upgrading to NetWare 4.1x servers, decided that NT Server would have been too costly a proposition to support
the high-availability demands of its financial-trading business. Louis Palena, president of Corey Hill Consulting, a Boston company
that did the firm's network design, says his client would have demanded domain controllers--which house security and access
rights--in at least a dozen offices, with backup for each. The associated cost for hardware, training, and maintenance would have
come to anywhere from $350,000 to $1 million a year, Palena estimates.
However, Palena says his client will continue to deploy NT Server for applications. The financial firm's NetWare and NT project
teams have been merged, he says, to reflect the firm's emphasis on features rather than underlying platforms. "We have no monolithic
strategy," Palena says. "It depends on the functionality we need." If Microsoft delivers a directory in early 1998, as promised, "we'll
certainly take a look at it," he adds.
The keen interest in Workstation Manager, which will be available next month free on Novell's Web site , shows just how much
corporations with global networks value centralized administration. While NT Server continues to make inroads into corporations,
its success is exposing its limitations in scalability and manageability, analysts say.
Novell, which has tried to beat NT on its own terms, has started the new year determined to deliver products that will co-exist with
NT and halt the erosion of NetWare's market share. Novell and Microsoft last year ironed out a dispute about cross-licensing of
code to make Microsoft clients work seamlessly with NetWare servers.
"The network is going to be heterogeneous," says Novell president Joe Marengi. "That's what we've always said, and we are finally
executing, with real products. That's a fundamental change."
Mike Nash, Microsoft's director of marketing for NT infrastructure products, notes that NT's strength is in applications support. "If
the customer is already using NetWare and only wants to use their future operating system as a file-and-print server, then NetWare
is fine," Nash says. "But when they realize that they want an applications server and a Web server, then they usually decide to go to
NT."
Ironically, companies that roll out NT Server for applications will find that Microsoft's server platform is less than optimal for
managing Microsoft's desktop platform, analysts say. "If you want any kind of account management and desktop configuration
management, your only choice with NT is to stick in a domain," says Neil MacDonald, an analyst with Gartner Group Inc. in
Stamford, Conn. "And domains are one of NT's weakest features."
Still, some NT users don't see an overwhelming need for centralized management. Chris Sweet, operations manager for Houston's
Department of Public Works, says the agency has had "good success" with domains for its six NT servers. "In our environment,"
Sweet says, "the lack of centralized management hasn't been as much of a hindrance as many would have you believe."
Kent Leary, a computer systems engineer with Haworth Inc., an office furniture maker in Holland, Mich., says his company
probably will go with a single domain for its NT application servers. But Haworth opted for Workstation Manager to manage its NT
desktops, giving up a plan to implement several NT domains for that infrastructure.
The company has 70 NetWare servers; other platforms include three Unix servers and half a dozen NT Servers. "We had planned
on implementing a few NT servers as domain controllers for centralized administration of NT accounts," Leary says. "But that was
hard for our management to accept, because we have a large investment in our NetWare systems."
In the mixed networks that are becoming the norm, Novell hopes NDS will provide a universal directory service. Still, all vendors
have a long way to go before they can provide a truly heterogeneous networking environment. Customers are demonstrating that
their infrastructures will remain mixed for some time.
With additional reporting by Stuart J. Johnston
Comments?
informationweek.com
|
