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

To: Frederick Smart who wrote (23391)	8/8/1998 3:30:00 PM
From: Jack Whitley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

<<So those are the key areas to focus on. Comments welcome......>> Fred, Thanks for the insights. I've especially been interested in possible NDS applications in the telecom/WAN environment for over a year. It would seem the potential is great here. Hopefully we are getting close. Another area I am concerned about is e-mail migration. In lieu of no real industrial strength transaction processing being done on networks (yet), e-mail is still the killer app. I have read with keen interest lately regarding Lotus' new 'no Netware' policy which the attached article explains. I read the article below and I want to think it is actually an opportunity to push Groupwise into facilities that haven't had it before. After looking at the article below, what are your (or any of the other smart tech people who so generously post here)thoughts. jww ****************************************************************** Column: E-Mail Migration: Beware The Snowball Effect Nothing is ever easy. Take my house, for instance. It's a reliable dwelling packed full of Old World craftsmanship you don't find in the typical suburban neighborhood. In an old house, though, it's inevitable that any simple upgrade snowballs into two or three protracted ancillary projects. Case in point: When I recently tore out part of a wall to give a room a more open feel, I quickly discovered I had no subfloor. As a result, I had to patch the hole, then refinish the floor. One thing led to another, and before I knew it I decided to refinish the entire floor on the top story. I pulled up the old carpeting in the front bedroom only to discover I had to scrape off a layer of linoleum to get down to the wood. My remodeling example hits on some of the same issues E- mail administrators will finally face when they rip out their old familiar file-sharing and legacy E-mail systems and begin to migrate to client/server. At first glance, the work required to perform the migration may appear straightforward. But soon administrators will discover there's no subfloor to the project. The dirty little migration secret lies in infrastructure upgrades. Make no mistake, one problem will lead to another. Vendors never mention this pitfall as they talk about moves to next-generation messaging systems, which include the glories of standards support and enough bells and whistles to make Las Vegas look like a small-town carnival. When pressed, they reply: "No matter what you move to, you're going to have some problems." Now, how comforting is that? Microsoft touts its toolbox full of migration utilities. Lotus, too, likes to talk about options, especially since it has dumped a message queue full of them on cc:Mail users in the past six months. The infrastructure problem may be no more obvious than in the issues cc:Mail administrators face if they move to Domino. The groupware application is no longer available for NetWare, which supports 85 percent to 90 percent of the cc:Mail installations. If those users add Windows NT or move totally to NT, that's when the holes in their floors will appear. With NT, infrastructure just isn't built the way it used to be. NT's popularity is nothing short of amazing, but the rush to adopt it has more to do with marketing and price/performance than with scalability and reliability. One analyst summed up the problem simply: "NT needs adult supervision." His basic advice is that if you implement NT, you need something else to manage it. It's not a matter of choice, it's a matter of necessity. In the Domino/cc:Mail example, if you run Domino on one NT server it runs fine with its adult supervisor, NetWare. But NT must run on a high-powered box to match NetWare-like performance. Consider the cost for that new box. While you're at it, don't forget to account for flimsy security with NT or weigh the new administrative tools you need. NDS for NT can handle system management. Domino, however, has to scale, which is why it's called groupware. Because NT doesn't scale very well, multiple NT boxes are needed to carry the load. Let's say you're a large shop with 20,000 users and you're able to put 500 Domino users reliably on a box. Given NT's penchant to crash and the fact your E-mail is mission-critical, 500 may be a generous number. So now you need 40 NT boxes to handle Domino. Congratulations, you've just spent a lot of money to build a huge administrative head-ache! You have no reliable directory, you have a weak security model and you need an army of administrators to handle all those servers. Sound suspiciously like my home remodeling project? Is NT equipped to handle your enterprisewide, mission-critical E-mail? Not without a lot of backbreaking administrative work. Although Lotus is forcing its cc:Mail customers in that direction, it knows that only the smallest of shops will survive on the platform. Any E-mail administrator that desires scalability and craves reliability will need a supporting infrastructure. Lotus parent IBM knows that users will discover the dirty little infrastructure secret the hard way. Oh, and by the way, it has a Unix server or an OS/390 architecture it'll sell you to solve your scalability problem. But that's another remodeling project. By John Fontana Fontana is a senior editor at InternetWeek. This issue sponsored by: InternetWeek