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

To: Paul Fiondella who wrote (18487)	11/13/1997 9:25:00 AM
From: David A. Lethe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

>If there is a performance gain using Novell (which there should be) then some companies will switch, that means they will buy a copy of IntranetWare to go with their web server. I strongly disagree. It wouldn't be very smart for a company to do this. 1) IF the company has NT experience and no (little) netware experience, then the administrative/support costs will certainly far exceed any benefits of a faster server. 2) "Speed" of the server must also factor in the speed of the pipe. If a NT server is serving requests at, say 95% CPU overhead, and the NOVL server might serve at 50% overhead, then NOVL is twice as fast... But that doesn't necessarily mean requests will get serviced any faster. A company also has to investigate available bandwidth available to the ISP over their T1/ISDN/ATM ... 3) Licensing costs... Lets get outragously generous and say that NOVL serves HTML requests twice as fast as NT. The cost of a second NT-based system will certainly be less then that. Furthermore, now the company will have TWO web servers. Redundancy, load balancing, disaster recovery, many security benefits. A dual-server environment adds much business value to the web serving problem, and those values should be factored into the equation. 4) Gee, I don't know, maybe ... add a little more RAM or a processor upgrade to the existing server to compensate (if it will REALLY make a difference). What is this, 10 minutes? Certainly a lot less time then loading a new operating system, server, converting everything, testing. 5) Logistics. Gotta 2nd PC to use as a server sitting around gathering dust. No? Then just blow away your current webserver. Nobody cares if you are down for a few days to get it going. 6) Conversion costs... Trust me, it is non-trivial to migrate sophisticated web sites from one operating system to the next. Especially with the differences in CGI programming, and security between the two web server environments. Too much work. I see a system administrator laughing in the face of anyone suggesting making this change. Oh, you also want to muck with the DNS or SMTP server??? Gotta do that too if you have it all on the same box... Thats ok, you don't mind pulling an all-nighter and having people w/o any network services or mail for a while. Oh? Your email robots, aliases, and messages stored on the server all go bye bye, and have to be rewritten. No converstion utilities? Thats ok too. Just spend a few more weeks testing, because there is no going back. If you try that, then mail will certainly be lost forever. Surely no POs or requests for product information to your company's salespeople will get lost. Salespeople won't mind. Your job will be safe. Sorry Paul. It just isn't going to happen unless the person who approves this is "on the take". <grin> David