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Technology Stocks : Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bernie Weinsaft who wrote (30739)	3/17/2000 12:08:00 PM
From: Bernie Weinsaft	Respond to of 42771

PCWeek review of Zenworks for Servers ZENworks Cuts Legwork in NetWare Shops By Cameron Sturdevant, PC Week Labs March 13, 2000 12:00 AM ET Managers of Novell Inc. NetWare 4.x and 5.x servers will soon get a lot less exercise because ZENworks for Servers Version 1.0 became available earlier this month. ZENworks for Servers fills a niche often occupied by in-house configuration scripts that are usually installed by walking from server to server with a checklist in one hand and a stack of CDs in the other. ZENworks for Servers joins Novell's two other ZENworks iterations ? ZENworks for Networks and ZENworks for Desktops ? to provide end-to-end management for NetWare environments. During PC Week Labs' tests, we used ZENworks for Servers to master two tedious tasks: implementing standard configuration policies and distributing software files and whole applications to NetWare servers, all from the comfort of the new Novell ConsoleOne software installed on a PC. ZENworks for Servers 1.0 has an introductory price of $40 per user until the end of next month, when the price is slated to rise to $75 per user. Volume discounts are available. This first-version release has none of the technical flaws usually associated with new software, but our tests did uncover areas that could use improvement. For starters, the product is NetWare-centric; managers of heterogeneous networks can't use ZENworks for Servers to reduce the number of server management consoles used in their operations centers. The second biggest limitation of ZENworks for Servers is that each NetWare tree requires a separate copy of the management software, although we were able to use a single management console to connect, one at a time, to the various trees in the test network. Finally, the software distribution architecture restricts receiving servers to one distribution point. However, multiple distribution points can distribute files and applications to many receivers simultaneously. Novell officials said Version 1.5, which is due sometime this year, will let receivers and distributors get software from any distributor, thus eliminating some of the finicky planning we had to do to make sure our software deployments worked. ZENworks 'consoles' administrators NetWare administrators should be ecstatic when they see the latest version of Novell's Java-based server management component, ConsoleOne Version 1.2c, which ships with ZENworks for Servers. Unlike the wickedly slow, grainy ConsoleOne, which currently torments all NetWare administrators, ConsoleOne 1.2c is fast and sharp ? which is good, because it is the only way to access ZENworks for Servers. After installing ZENworks for Servers and ConsoleOne, we started our tests by reading a lot. Like any server management product, ZENworks for Servers requires administrators to define goals and objectives first and then implement the software. Novell's excellent documentation provided us with numerous worksheets and instructions that made implementing the test suite a straightforward process. ZENworks for Servers policies are the heart of Novell's product, and we found that they were more than adequate when it came to defining the rules for governing such crucial actions as downing a server or deleting log files. For example, we defined a policy that disallowed downing a server if particular users were connected to it. We easily set the number of minutes before an action could be put into play and could specify the time of day when server activities would happen. ZENworks for Servers includes one of the best software distribution tools we've seen for server software distribution. Again, however, managers will have to spend a lot of time configuring the complex web of distributors, channels, subscriptions, subscribers, packages and schedules that Novell uses to accomplish the task. We set up distributors, which are simply NetWare servers that are the source of the files that are to be deployed. Next, we assigned subscribers to particular distributors while also defining schedules and distribution rules, such as hardware and software prerequisites, and actions, such as NLM unloading and loading. We were also able to assign NetWare set commands to our distributions. Our only complaint is that subscribers could be assigned to only one distributor, thus requiring that we deploy the same package from several distributors to make sure all our target machines got the files and applications we were pushing out. Technical Analyst Cameron Sturdevant can be contacted at cameron_sturdevant@ zd.com.