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

To: Jim McCormack who wrote (21775)	4/23/1998 7:08:00 PM
From: Peter Connolly	Respond to of 42771

Hi Jim I don't doubt that Netscape can produce figures on their web site that shows that their Directory Server is pretty fast. I can't counter them because I don't have a like-for-like comparison in favour of Novell! However, I have to ask, just what was that directory server doing, in real terms, for the network? It looks like it was some fancy fort of address list. If you look at what NDS can achieve towards reducing administration overhead, comparing a simple directory on a server, as opposed to NDS which is a directory service, is meaningless. Here are some facts from Novell's web site, as I said they're meaningless compared to Netscape's tests, but enlightening in themselves... (A 1,000,000 user NDS tree was created....these are some figures about it's performance) NDS login times - logging in to the million-user tree as a random user took less then 7 seconds on average, regardless of the location of the user within the NDS tree. This included processing the default login script, with one real drive and two search drives to the server. Logging in to the million-user tree was as fast, if not faster, than logging in to a production NDS tree. Nwadmin search - using the pull-down search feature of nwadmin, a search for all users objects was tested from a windows 95* client. Twenty minutes later, all million users were displayed in a single window. dib database sizes - the sys:_netware directory was scanned using rconsole. The NDS database files were approximately 320 megabytes. Since each server held approximately 125,000 user accounts in the initial million-user test, the average NDS user record size (accounting for the attributes used in this test) was approximately 2.5 kilobytes per user. NDS mount times - restarting NDS servers by either mounting the sys: volume or reloading ds.nlm starts certain NDS processes, such as building hashing tables of NDS to improve performance. Mounting the 320 megabyte NDS databases in the million-user tree test required approximately 30 minutes before the NDS database was fully loaded and available. Nwadmin performance - the million-user tree design held 1,250 users in each container. Opening any of the containers displayed all 1,250 users in less than 7 seconds, which also includes client-side processing for alphabetically sorting the 1,250 users. Managing the million-user tree with nwadmin was just as fast, if not faster, than managing production NDS trees of similar container sizes. Taken from novell.com Note - Nwadmin - the main administration tool for NetWare 4.x dib - Directory Information Base - the files that hold NDS information Jim, this directory is more than a simple look-up engine to produce email addresses to a mail client. This kind of directory runs entire networks, including security, access rights, internet permissions, application deployment and distribution, dial-in support, email address book synchronisation and account creation plus single sign-on (There's something I really miss!!). LDAP is indeed a gateway with NDS, possibly a point of failure, but the simple answer is to deploy multiple LDAP servers on multiple NDS servers, so there's no single point of failure for the lookup. Whatever you can say about Novell, it's management, previous products, etc. you cannot fault a five year start in a technology arena. Novell and the NDS team have been to places that neither Netscape nor MSFT know they have to go to yet, never mind getting back from. I'll take NDS any day over a directory server from someone else, no matter how big the company or how rich the CEO. In summary, if you're not looking for anything, you'll find it pretty quickly. If you're looking to run an entire network from a single point, there aren't many choices available today. Regards Peter