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

To: ToySoldier who wrote (23865)	9/18/1998 10:32:00 AM
From: DJBEINO	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Sun could learn a lesson on Java from Netscape Netscape's co-founder, Marc Andreessen, thinks so. Ditto for Eric Schmidt, chairman and chief executive at Novell Inc. Schmidt was one of Java's prime boosters when he was Sun's chief technology officer, a job he left last year to join Novell, where he has pushed to make Java one of the key weapons in his new company's software arsenal. mercurycenter.com

To: ToySoldier who wrote (23865)	9/18/1998 9:33:00 PM
From: Jack Whitley	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 42771

<<With Active Directory, MSFT is simply making some major face-lift repairs to a Domain system that everyone in the industry knows cannot be scaled for enterprise computing. It wont even come close to NDS regarding the maturity and scalability of the directory.>> ToySoldier, You are preaching to the choir. I agree with you regarding NDS and its superiority. As far as my 2+ year investment in NOVL, I am trying very hard to convince myself (objectively) that NOVL has enough product to substantially increase revenue and stock price. I have a great friend in the Pacific Rim who is trying to tell me the NOVL battle is REALLY uphill. He is probably doing his best to keep me from losing my ass. I am going to paste his latest response to me when I asked him the question "Sure NT runs e-mail and office apps for 3,000 users, but can it support heavy database calls and transaction processing?" My friend does not disagree that NDS is a good product, but the information that he gives me does not help me feel that Netware 5.0 is going to cause a rush away from NT Server, or even a rush to Netware 5.0 (NDS excluded). I guess I feel better about NDS sales to NT shops, but how much revenue can be generated this way. Novell has a 350 million share float, they need big numbers to move up dramatically. Again, I have been long here (and now nicely averaged down) for 2 1/2 years, so I am not trying to sow FUD. By the way, I read your excellent remarks on NDS on the IBM thread, I am going to forward these to my friend, and see what his response is, if you don't mind. jww (my friend's response below)(I xx'd out company names) ******************************************************************* To answer your question of large enterprise NT implementation, many of the larger enterprises here in xxxxxxxxx use NT as their corporate NOS, and have a host of NT applications specific for the various departments. The thing about how to differentiate between email and office automation services to hard hitting databases .. the answer is today, many email packages and office automation services rely on database and transaction log technology. Email systems such as MS Exchange uses the Jet database and is a transaction log based database similar to any sequential database package (Oracle, SQL Svr, Informix etc..). The biggest difference in design is that the Exchange jet database is optimized for unstructured data storage and retrieval of data while in the common sequential database is optimized for structured storage and retrieval. Both types of database technology uses transaction logs, where data is written to logs before being committed into the database ensuring no loss in data and rollback functionality. So today email systems are in fact hard hitting database applications especially if you have many mailboxes on one server. Also many on-line intranet services has databases on the back-end and is no longer just content publishing. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (6200+ PC/email users with approx. 20,000 employees)have been using NT since 95 as their corporate NOS (they moved from Banyan/Lanman Unix). Their mission critical transaction databases are still mainly on Unix and mainframe machines, but total number of users for each of those systems are probably just a couple of hundred. If you look at corporate computing resources that everyone with a PC uses then it'll be things like file&print, email, intranet/internet resources. All of these systems are running on NT servers, centrally administered and managed. We're in the process of trimming down some of their 30+ MS Mail PO's over WAN into 5 large MS Exchange clusters. Each node in this cluster start off with 1GB of RAM (expandable to 4GB), 4 PP200 CPUs, 54GB of HD space. Each cluster will house from 1500 - 2000 users concurrently over xxxxxxx(Corporate Information Superhighway) infrastructure (155Mbps ATM WAN short term). Based on our load simulation tests, and Digital's specifications each of our cluster configuration should be able to hold up to 4000 concurrent users. Our main issue is NOT the performance, limitations to hardware or software technology, but more on the operational issues. When we look at a 50+ GB database per cluster, things such as backup/restore timeframe etc become the "bottle neck". We want to guarantee a full restore of the database within a 2-3 hr timeframe, so the database cannot be too large. Right now we are using an ATL tape library with DLT 7000 tapes/drives, fast, but faster would be better. So far the NT server 4.0 Enterprise has not buckled under these circumstances. Another client (xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) has over 7500 PC users and the organization again uses NT server as their corporate NOS and a host of NT application servers. They moved away from Novell in 1995 due to Novell's back then strict "pay us only in US$$ licensing scheme", which was against xxxxxxxx's policy. I've just returned from Perth Austrialia spending 1 week with our sister company there working with some of the enterprise clients. The entire Western Australia Health dept and Wooside and Western Mining(petrochemical companies) are also running NT as the enterprise NOS with great success. These examples are still insignificant to the Boeings, the GEs, etc.. where NT is being used as the corporate NOS. I would say that NT can and will work well in large enterprises. NDS will start showing a clear advantage when the organization has more than 26,000 user & computer accounts (that's when you'll need a multi-master NT Domain infrastructure), and I guess that is why MS is coming up with Active Directory in its next release.