And MSFT's Active Directory officially falls further behind in the Directory Services front....
NDS V8 Ships Today
By Jeffrey Schwartz , InternetWeek
12:03 PM EST Tues., May 11, 1999
Novell's next-generation directory ships today.
Existing NDS customers running NetWare 5.0 will be able to download the new version, dubbed NDS V8, at Novell's website for free. But the bad news is NetWare 4.x shops will have to upgrade to NetWare 5 to run the new directory.
A Novell spokeswoman said because NetWare 3.x and 4.x interoperate with NetWare
5.0, organizations don't have to perform complete migrations to run the new NDS release.
Ultimately, NDS V8 will run natively on Windows NT and Solaris, but for now, it only runs on NetWare.
It is unclear what pricing models Novell is considering once NDS V8 is available on multiple platforms. Novell said the new directory will share a common code base across different operating environments.
In addition to supporting the LDAPv3 standard natively, Novell is trying to convince IT managers that NDS V8 can be used as an enterprise directory that can be extended to the Internet, letting companies add business partners and customers to the repository.
At its annual BrainShare conference in Salt Lake City in March, Novell demonstrated NDS V8 with 1 billion entries.
Beta testers have already said the new release is a marked improvement over its predecessor. "What NDS V8 does is significantly improve the LDAP interface in terms of search speeds," said Peter Cruikshank, a network architect with the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command of the U.S. Navy.
Cruikshank is also looking forward to NDS V8 shipping on Solaris and NT.
While NDS is available on those other platforms, he said it is not scalable enough in its current incarnation. But he relishes the idea that NDS will not be dependent on NetWare going forward.
"We want the flexibility to not be restricted to any particular OS," he said.
varbusiness.com
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