Novell On The Prowl With Wolf
February 17, 1997, Issue: 650
Section: Top of the News
By Sharon Fisher
Novell is about to sic its wolves on Microsoft.
At its Brainshare conference next month, Novell is expected to release
details about its Wolf Mountain clustering technology, which will take
direct aim at Microsoft's WolfPack initiative.
Novell would not comment, but advance Brainshare materials indicate
that Wolf Mountain will offer a clustered Java execution environment, a
64-bit unified file system, support for I2O standards and communications
links via ATM, IPv6, IP and IPX/SPX.
News of the impending release put some NetWare users' minds at ease
about the future of the network operating system. "Anything they can do
to combat NT at this point makes me a lot more comfortable with the
investments we have in Novell," said Joel House, IS director for Louis
London Inc., St. Louis.
Clustering links servers together, thus boosting reliability and scalability.
Both vendors' initiatives define application programming interfaces to
enable applications to run across the cluster.
Microsoft released its software into beta in December and plans to ship it
by summer.
"Microsoft has been very vocal on what they're doing with clustering, so
we'd be interested in what Novell has to say," said Mike Krutchen,
database administrator for United Power Association, Elk River, Minn.
Both companies' first releases are likely to focus on automatic server
fail-over, similar to Novell's System Fault Tolerance III, a NetWare
add-on that lets network administrators set up a duplicate "mirrored"
server that can take over in the event of a failure. Scale also is limited in
the first round; WolfPack, for instance, supports only two servers in this
phase.
Future versions of both products should support more servers and
incorporate more advanced features that would not require servers to
store redundant data and applications.
Novell already has lent support to third-party options for availability and
reliability.
In December, the company said it will join Compaq and NetFrame
Systems Inc., Milpitas, Calif., to support HotPlug PCI, which lets users
swap server adapters without bringing down the server.
Novell also endorsed NetFrame's Cluster Data, which maps additional
paths to disk drives over Novell Directory Services and automatically
implements them should one fail.
Copyright r 1997 CMP Media Inc.
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