Friday, November 13, 1998, 5:00 p.m. ET.
internetwk.com
Another Win For NDS
By ELLIS BOOKER
Put another internetworking vendor in the NDS
column.
This week, Bay Networks, a Nortel Networks
unit, said it plans to bundle and integrate Novell
Directory Services (NDS) with its Optivity policy
management application suite next year.
The alliance follows a similar deal Novell made
with Lucent Technologies, which last month said
it intends to offer NDS support in its enterprise
switching gear.
Both Bay and Lucent said they plan to ship their
NDS offerings in the first half of next year.
Many internetworking vendors view
directory-based networking as the next crucial
step in the development of switched networks.
Storing information about users and network
devices in a common directory format--a major
goal of both Novell alliances--should not only
make it easier for IT managers to manage their
networks but will lay the foundation for quality of
service and policy networking.
The alliances are significant victories for Novell.
The company has been looking for ways to
broaden the deployment of NDS beyond its
installed base of about 40 million users. The
new support for NDS also could be an indicator
of opinion about Microsoft's repeated delays in
delivering its Active Directory, the distributed
directory component of Windows 2000 (formerly
NT 5.0). Windows 2000 is scheduled to go into
its third beta in the first quarter of next year and
is not expected to be generally available until
mid-1999 at the earliest.
Bay officials said the real-world status of NDS
definitely figured into their decision to use the
Novell directory structure.
"Novell's NDS represents the most mature
product, and largest deployment," said Craig
Easley, director of product marketing for network
management and policy services at Bay. There
is an attractive overlap between Bay's installed
base of 40,000 to 50,000 customer
organizations and the approximately 40,000
organizations that use NDS, he added.
"We want to be in position so that a network
manager setting up users and groups and
policies [for the network] can seamlessly dip
into directories they already have," Easley said.
Nortel, Bay's parent company, will maintain its
previous directory agreements with Microsoft
and Netscape; there is no exclusivity built into
the NDS deal, he said.
By casting their lots with NDS, Bay and Lucent
are giving Novell a leg up on Netscape and,
more important, Microsoft in the directory
services race, Novell officials said. "The more
applications are integrated with NDS, the more
value overall the system has, especially as we
compete with hype from other [vendors]," said
Ron Palmeri, vice president of strategic relations
at Novell.
At Comdex next week, Novell and Bay will show
how Bay switches can be identified in the NDS
tree and how those switches can be configured
via a snap-in for NWAdmin, Novell's
configuration management client, Palmeri said.
Novell also is planning to work with the Bay and
Lucent gear through ConsoleOne, a forthcoming
Java-based management client.
Novell said it hopes that the support of Lucent
and Bay will give it some leverage in the
Desktop Management Task Force, which is
developing the Directory-Enabled Networking
standard. DEN is championed by Cisco and
Microsoft, but Novell--one of the charter
members of the DMTF--said it wants to
encourage members of the standards body to
review NDS technology for possible inclusion in
the final specification.
"The fact that Lucent and Nortel have chosen
NDS indicates it's the directory structure right
now that's ready for prime time," said John
McConnell, president of McConnell Associates,
a consulting company.
DEN's initial promise is to simplify the headache
of manually programming individual routers and
switches for interfaces, protocols and user
rights, McConnell said. "Going forward, the idea
is that the router will go to the directory to get
that information," he said.
Over time, DEN will facilitate the deployment of
QoS-oriented technologies, such as
priority-based bandwidth allocation for specific
users or applications, McConnell predicted.
By siding with NDS, Lucent and Bay will force
unaligned internetworking players, such as
Ascend Communications Inc. and 3Com, to
"have something comparable, with a distributed
directory, or they will fall behind," McConnell
said.
3Com this week said its Transcend Policy
Server, which is due to ship in the first half of
next year, will support NDS, Netscape's
Directory Server and Microsoft's Active Directory
when it becomes available. Ascend could not be
reached for comment.
Cisco, which is helping Microsoft to develop
Active Directory, appeared unfazed by the Bay
and Lucent announcements. "We're a
development partner with Microsoft for Active
Directory, and we're contributing significant
dollars and engineering personnel," said Doug
Wills, a Cisco spokesman. Cisco already offers
some policy-based and QoS capabilities in its
product line today, he said.
Cisco allied with Active Directory nearly two
years ago after being rebuffed as a partner by
Novell, according to insiders.
Bay said it will ship NDS support in its Optivity
management system by the second quarter of
next year.
Nortel's high-end enterprise and carrier-class
switches also will implement NDS in the next 18
to 24 months, Easley said. "Ultimately,
'directory-enablement' will span from the
enterprise to the carrier space," he said. |
