Welcome Paul, glad to see you back!!
Here is a posting from the NOVL Fan Club Groupies.... LOL
plesman.com
The Civil NOS Wars
Novell Netware and Windows NT: Under serious observation
By Andrew Brooks
Special to CN
You can call Novell Inc.'s and Microsoft Corp.'s chase for the network operating
system (NOS) market
the "NOS war," as some observers have, or you can follow the lead of the main
players themselves
and insist that reality just isn't that dramatic.
Whatever your view may be, there's no disputing the fact that the recent release of
version 5.0 of
Novell's NetWare and the anticipated release (in 1999 or even, some say, as late
as 2000) of version
5.0 of Microsoft's Windows NT are drawing fresh attention to what is beginning to
look like a serious
showdown over the critical NOS turf.
Traditionally, Novell has its deepest roots in network services, and NetWare has
come to be
associated with strong file-and-print and distributed management, while NT's
strength has been as an
applications platform. For Bob Sakakeeny, group vice-president at for
Boston-based IT consulting firm
The Aberdeen Group, those distinctions are unlikely to change with the new
releases of the two
products.
"The ISVs [independent software vendors] have been writing a lot of applications
for [NT]," says
Sakakeeny. "That's its strength — as an applications server."
Aberdeen has been heavily involved recently in researching and publishing papers
on NT and
NetWare. One conclusion Aberdeen has come to, Sakakeeny says, is that NT
works well managing
applications in a workgroup setting. He notes one user that has 4000 remote sites
running NT servers
and workstations. But Sakakeeny is not bullish on NT as a NOS.
"It's when — for whatever reason — the company gets convinced to do NT Server
as the horizontal
NOS across the entire enterprise that it begins to collapse," Sakakeeny observes.
"A lot of the folks
we're talking to are using NetWare or Unix or OS/2 as the management platform
to compensate for
NT's problems as a NOS."
The key to success for a NOS, given the proliferation of heterogeneous computing
environments, may
be the strength of a system's directory services, which Sakakeeny describes as
absolutely key. And
his reaction to the NetWare 5.0, after attending the launch, is very favorable,
especially when it comes
to Novell's Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) enterprise directory,
Novell Directory
Services (NDS).
"I've always liked the product, and I think what they have in it now is very good.
Two pieces stand out:
one is the move to pure IP rather than IPX, the other is some of the improvements
in the directory
services."
Novell hopes that the move to pure IP will bring dramatic results for users
running heterogeneous
systems.
"Most customers have multiple systems," says Ross Chevalier, director of
technology for Novell
Canada. "And all have multiple protocols on the wire: TCP/IP, NetBEUI, IPX. If
you can get to an all-IP
environment, that's a massive win in terms of performance."
Novell has built its Domain Name System (DNS) server and Dynamic Host
Configuration Protocol
(DHCP) server right into NDS, Chevalier says, to help ease the delivery of IP
throughout the enterprise.
NDS has been around for several years, and Novell has been busy announcing
new versions that
interoperate with NT, as well as with Solaris, Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Unix-based
user environment. In
fact, Novell claims that NDS provides better management of NT than Microsoft
does itself.
One user who agrees with that assessment is Charles Lippe, a technology
consultant with
Montreal-based network integrator DTM Information Technology Inc., a leading
Microsoft Solutions
provider in Quebec.
"NDS for NT may be the greatest product that Novell has released," Lippe says.
"The best way to
manage your network right now is with NDS. NDS can run on multiple platforms
and this will be more
true as the months go by."
"Directory services is a piece of the solution," counters Neil Froggatt,Windows
product manager at
Microsoft Canada in Mississauga, Ont. "There's a whole lot of things that have to
happen on a server in
order to deliver return for your investment. Directory services is one. Supporting
server-based
applications would be another, and then the traditional file and print services as
well."
Nonetheless, Microsoft has made en-hanced directory services central to NT's new
iteration. Its
answer to NDS is Active Directory Services (ADS). ADS is also, at least in part, a
response to the
criticism that NT has scaled poorly in the past.
"With ADS you're looking at a very extensible directory service that makes it easy
for companies or
third parties to extend it and provide added functionality," says Froggatt. "You
can create your own
object extensions. You don't have to deal with the objects you're given with ADS
initially."
During the development of NT 5.0, Microsoft's focus reportedly shifted to
reducing total cost of
ownership (TCO), a concept that has become something of a buzzword lately.
In addition to the IntelliMirror feature which enables network administrators to
set policies and
configure PCs remotely, Microsoft is offering the Microsoft Management Console
(MMC) which offers
centralized management, and integrates more tools for device management and
disk administration. It
also supports third party management tools, such as those from Computer
Associates and Tivoli
Systems Inc.
According to The Aberdeen Group's Sakakeeny, however, the industry reaction to
ADS so far has
been lukewarm.
"The folks I've talked to in the ISV community who have been playing with the
beta version of Active
Directory have said that if you compare it with the white paper that Microsoft
came out with originally,
there's a huge difference. While it's a major improvement over the current
directory, it's still nowhere
close to what NDS or some of the other directory services offer."
Microsoft's Froggatt points out that JD Edwards and Co., The Baan Co. and SAP
AG are integrating
their ERP products with ADS. Others include Entrust Tehnologies, 3Com Corp.,
AXENT Technologies
Inc., PC DOCS Inc. and Seagate Software.
NetWare may be a good distance ahead of NT on another critical front: the
incorporation of Java
features. Novell claims that NetWare 5's Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is the
world's fastest Java
application engine on any platform. But some see this as a dream deferred.
"The question is, who has large enterprise applications written in Java?" asks
Dan Kusnetzky,
program director, operating environments and serverware services for
International Data Corp. (IDC)
in Sarasota, Fla. "Nobody, today. This platform may be very exciting for the
future as Java-based
applications start coming on-line. But it doesn't solve the problem today. A large
number of
Java-based applications usually isn't in the portfolio."
In the end, sheer momentum may decide the day. NetWare has an installed base of
some 4 million
servers but NT has been making inroads, and the market momentum shows no
sign of slowing down.
NT has superior mind share and ISV support, especially in the Internet and
intranet areas, and
Microsoft dominates the desktop.
"Once a decision is reached to migrate to NT, the chances are very slim for the
organization to change
direction midstream," says Mohamed Lalani, director of IT and systems at
Toronto-based Canada
Newswire. "We know that NetWare has more to offer and could be a good
working platform, however
at Canada NewsWire we have accepted NT as our operating system."
Kusnetzky describes NetWare 5.0 as a very good upgrade that will find a
receptive audience with the
NetWare installed base. However he says marketing strategy may have more to
do with who comes
out ahead.
"The story today is not technology winning. Marketing is winning. Up to a year
ago, [Novell was] talking
to the technologists and seemed unaware that more and more of the time it's a
business person
making the decision. Dilbert's boss — not Dilbert — was making the decision.
"Six to eight months ago they started to present the business case, and if you look
at it it's a pretty
good message. The next challenge is, are they really getting to the business
people? That's a question
I can't answer yet." cn
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