Novell's Head Of R&D Maps Out Direction
Jul 06, 1999 (Tech Web - CMP via COMTEX) -- Stewart Nelson, senior vice president of Novell's products group, spoke last week with CRN Associate Editor Lee Copeland about thecompany's product road map. Nelson heads development on Novell products, including NetWare, GroupWise, ManageWise, BorderManager, and Novell Directory Services (NDS).
CRN: What's happening with the digitalme technology Novell showed at Brainshare '99 in March?
Nelson: With digitalme, we are working very hard to get a downloadable beta out in July that people will actually be able to use, touch, feel [and] experience anywhere throughout the world. And, of course, we're working with a lot of partners that we haven't announced yet.
CRN: Are these service providers? Would this be some of the banking folks that were talked about at Brainshare?
Nelson: The application for it is almost all over the Web. This is primarily a Web product, and probably only a Web product. We announced some banking alliances at Brainshare, and we expect to have more of those, and we expect to have some in the service provider area, as well.
CRN: And what about ZENworks 2.0? We hear it is focused on inventory.
Nelson: Yes, inventory of software, workstations. What's happening with the workstations and the software.
CRN: People are very excited about ZENworks; so excited that they want it included with NetWare, the same way Hewlett-Packard includes its management tools.
Nelson: Well, you're talking to an R&D person first of all, so let me qualify it. I'll probably say things that are not true or just my opinion. I'm supposed to deliver the stuff, as you know. My feeling is that ZENworks is a great product, and I think ZENworks is a great add-on, and I wouldn't put it in a box. But I don't know that those decisions have been finalized.
Of course, one of the big deals right now is ICS, our Internet Caching Service. Drew Major, who you may know if you follow Novell, is the creator of NetWare for the last 15 years and is the chief scientist for Novell. Drew came up with the idea of a caching appliance maybe about a year ago that we've been working on. We're actually bundling and shipping it July 7 with two hardware vendors that we announced at Brainshare: Dell and Compaq. And there will be others to follow them, as well.
Again, we came out with BorderManager about a year and a half ago and got into the caching marketplace. We now have an appliance, a caching appliance that does not require NetWare -- it actually ships on a box. That'll be what will be shipping with them on July 7th.
If you look at the appliance cache business, there are entire competitive companies out there that we compete with that have entire businesses built around this piece. If you look at the numbers that we have, BorderManager is about even with them. And if you take ICS and add it to the mix, we're scaling performance-wise, four, five, [or] six times above most of them. A part of this is because Drew, who wrote file and print for NetWare, has come up with a new way of doing file caching, which is about 10 times faster than the current COM, which is the Cache Object System. It is a very innovative unique technology
CRN: What about the Universal Console management tool? Nelson: We have two consoles: ConsoleOne, and we also have ConsoleWeb, which we started to ship with SCADS, which is basically an HTTP management of our systems. And actually, ICS uses the HTTP management piece from ConsoleWeb, which is basically the HTTP side of ConsoleOne. We do expect to have snap-ins in ConsoleOne for all of our products, as well.
CRN: If you wanted to deploy Novell Directory Services, would you want to be using this as the driving stick of the whole system?
Nelson: Absolutely. It first shipped with NetWare 5, if you'll remember, and we had some problems. It was too slow. There were some issues, and we've shipped NW Admin, and we've heard from our customers. We shipped with NDS [version] 8, which shipped about two months ago, and it's very scalable, very fast, and it's working very well.
CRN: People are interested in NDS. But we hear from integrators and customers who want better integration with back-end systems and custom applications. What are you doing to address that?
Nelson: First of all, let's talk SCADS, the code-name for NDS 8. I think that was a huge issue before NDS 8 came out, quite frankly, because we only supported a set of proprietary APIs. We had what was called our D-client API and our DS-API. We didn't have a tool kit that people could use, and this was really a huge issue. Let's remember with NDS 8 on NetWare, initially -- and, oh, by the way, let's talk about what's coming over the next 18 months -- Solaris and full NDS on NT and [NDS] 8 is going to come out in the August time frame, as well.
So, it's going to be very cross-platform, and Linux is going to come out in September. They support full LDAP. That means anyone who develops an LDAP v.3 application will run on top of NDS as if it were a native application, just like any other directory. So part of that has been put to rest, we think, right now. We're basically an open-standards directory, whereas in the past the big knock on us was that we were heavily proprietary.
And the stuff that they wrote for NDS, if they could get it written, was an NLM [NetWare Loadable Module]. It only ran on NDS, and that's not the case anymore. In fact, all the development that we're pushing inside is LDAP-based, and we're pushing all of our partners to write LDAP. Now that doesn't mean that we won't extend LDAP to do other things. Because, as you know, LDAP is not broad enough at this point. Our focus for our developers, both internally and externally, is LDAP.
CRN: So LDAP is the solution to these interoperability problems? Nelson: LDAP is a protocol, and we need to raise that up to be a better API set as well, which we are going to try to do. But yes, the interoperability issues are, correct me if I'm wrong, that we've heard complaints of is: "If I write an NDS app, it's an NDS app. It doesn't interoperate with anything else."
That is not true with [NDS version 8] anymore. CRN: When will you deliver a software developer's kit [SDK] to address these issues?
Nelson: We have an SDK that comes out in the Novell Developer Kit right now that basically supports D-client and LDAP. When we ship the cross-platform NDS in August, we will have more. |
