Industry baffled by Novell's claims for directory services
by Andy Donoghue, Network News UK
Confusion and scepticism from competitors and users
greeted claims by Novell that version 8 of its directory
services software will scale to one billion objects and be
suitable for use by ISPs.
Novell claims the improved scalability will make the
software a potential tool for ISPs looking to manage the
millions of objects on their networks.
However, Karl Meyer, business development manager at
UUNet, said he was doubtful that software conceived in
the enterprise could translate to the complex network
management needs of the ISP world.
"The ISP and enterprise worlds are very different. Our
users are transitory and drift in and out of the network. I
would be very interested to see how NDS will translate
over," he said.
Novell's rival in the directory services space, Netscape,
has also criticised version 8 for being too heavily tied into
Novell's NOS NetWare.
Netscape claims that users will need to adopt NetWare in
order to take advantage of NDS, which could be a real
problem for companies using an exclusively NT
environment.
Dusan Rnic, product marketing manager for Netscape,
said: "The problem is that NDS isn't cross-platform. If you
are targeting large corporations you are not going to
convince them to solely use NetWare. NDS is
multi-platform in terms of OS but not in terms of NOS."
Peter Joseph, corporate strategist at Novell, admitted that
NDS version 8 would not work without NWadmin - a
component of NetWare - and that the company was using
this fact to "further advantage" NetWare's future.
Derek Venter, Novell's marketing manager, claimed version
8 was infinitely more scalable than Netscape's offering.
"We are much bigger than they are. The performance of
the Netscape directory dips at a certain number of users,
while ours remains constant."
Rnic attacked what he termed "holes" in Novell's
announcement, particularly if the one billion object
scalability was on one server or across several. But he
applauded Novell's decision to move away from its
proprietary access protocol, which will allow it to provide
native support for version 3 of LDAP.
webserv.vnunet.com
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Paul, thanks for earlier comments. Also, here are some competitors'/users' thoughts on NDSv8. Directory battles appear to be heating up, as is the stock-- $26 1/8th! |
