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

To: Spartex who wrote (23912)	10/1/1998 3:34:00 PM
From: Jim Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

I too am interested in the professionals' response to this comparison, but did you catch the rumbling disclaimers at the end? "The information in this publication is subject to change without notice. . . . MINDCRAFT . . . shall not be liable for errors or omissions contained herein . . . . This publication does not constitute an endorsement of the product or products that were tested. This test is not a determination of product quality or correctness . . . ."

To: Spartex who wrote (23912)	10/5/1998 8:02:00 PM
From: DJBEINO	Respond to of 42771

I received this e-amil below about Mindcraft: I have just read the Mindcraft review on NT4.0 against NW5.0, and have the following comments 1) NT's file system does 'return before commit' so returning back to a client before data is written back to the disk system. NetWare does not. With the amount of RAM installed, I am guessing that all work done against NT was able to be done to RAM so not testing disk I/O. If you want this type of environment for NW you install more memory on the cache controller and less on the system board. The big but is as a manager of such a system do you want to have so much data held in RAM instead of located on the disks. 2) The type of file system tested for NW - i.e. NSS or 'Classic' was not tested. One report on a news group is that NSS was used with the default of 4Mbytes of space was used for the cache. if so NW did well with 4MB of cache again's NT's 1GB of space. 3) While allowing large TCP/IP windows on the NT server (17K), BOTH NW and NW may have restricted by limiting the maximum number of packet receive buffers being handled to just 512 for NW and 200 for NT, so the servers may be dropping packets. 4) The street price of NW is currently being decided - I.E. its a new product with limited supply. A 5 user copy of NW is given at $987, while Data Comm Warehouse is quoting $799 for the same product. 5) No focus has been made on the cost of the server, I don't know Compaq's cost for memory, but for HP systems 1GB of RAM could cost > $4000. Which is a bit over the top if NetWare was only using 4MB for its disk cache (note 2). 6) As NW comes with NAL, how much NT with the same features cost. Well add SMS for 144 users and a 5 user copy of MS SQL to run SMS. 7) Novell's clients (as well as Netbench) are both designed for moden PC systems, Intel dropped the P100 and P133 processors over a year ago, so why are all the client workstations so old!!! 8) The selection of NW SET options is odd Set maximum packet receive buffers = 512 See note 3 above Set immediate purge of deleted files = on This added extra load to a novell server as the disk space is added back to the free pool. Set read ahead enabled = off This stops the server pre-reading data which maybe needed in the near future. The reason for these comments is that I have a NW4 server based around a PP200 system with 256Mbytes of RAM and a RAID 1 controller with 2 drives running up to 210Mbits/s to 10 NT clients. This makes me wonder about some of the statements made.