Study: NetWare users shouldn't jump ship for NT
By Mary Jo Foley, Sm@rt Reseller
January 28, 1999 10:28 AM ET
Microsoft Corp. may be pushing resellers and their customers to migrate from NetWare to NT, but at least one market researcher says that may not be such a wise idea.
In a research note entitled "Upgrade to Windows NT From NetWare Can Triple Users' Costs," Giga Information Group advises its clients not to be too hasty in moving to NT 4.0. Giga does not discuss whether customers will save money by moving from NetWare 4.X to Windows 2000, according to the research note, because NT 4.0 "is the only [version] currently shipping."
"Giga advises corporate customers that are interested in maintaining the best price/performance model to stay with NetWare at least until Windows 2000 ships," the research note concludes. "If Windows 2000 ships in the fourth quarter of 1999, which is the current prediction, Giga believes it is best to adopt a conservative course. That is, do not upgrade to the new Microsoft [network operating system] until Year 2000 issues have been dealt with and until at least the first Windows 2000 Service Pack ships."
Microsoft 'respectfully disagrees'
"We respectfully disagree with the conclusions" of the Giga study, said Karan Khanna, lead product manager with Microsoft's Windows NT Server team. According to Khanna, the study is based on "unrealistic customer scenarios" that are "focused too narrowly on file and print services."
Khanna says that in Microsoft's experience, "customers tend to base their decisions on Web, applications and communications services." He said that all of these capabilities are either built into NT 4.0 or available as part of Microsoft's Option Pack and other add-ons.
Khanna points out that Microsoft has made public the names of a number of major customers moving from NetWare to NT. "These are fairly large customers with sophisticated IT departments who are voting with their feet," he said.
But some of the NetWare-to-NT wins published by Microsoft have turned out to be somewhat controversial. Recently, both the Kentucky Department of Education, as well as Dell Computer Corp., had problems with Microsoft's characterization that they were dumping NetWare in favor of NT.
Giga: Novell had nothing to do with study
A copy of the Giga research note is posted on Novell Inc.'s Web site. But Giga insists that Novell did not request that the researcher do the study, nor was Novell aware that the study was being conducted.
Giga claims that migration from NetWare to NT will result in increased costs across the board because of new capital expenditures associated with additional hardware; higher network administration expenditures; the need for add-on products to bring NT 4.0 up to par, feature-wise, with NetWare and Unix; and ongoing maintenance costs.
Giga says its results are based on interviews with "dozens of Fortune 1000 accounts as well as mid-sized firms during the last 12 to 18 months." Several of the corporate accounts Giga interviewed had been forced to retreat from plans to upgrade to NT 4.0 from NetWare, Unix, OS/2 Warp Server and Banyan Vines because they "could NOT achieve the same level of enterprise functionality with the Windows NT Server," says the research outfit.
"The users were unanimous that NetWare 4.x and NetWare 5.0 currently had more cost-effective, file, print and directory services than the current NT 4.0 release and that it would currently cost them 2x to 3x more to migrate from NetWare 4.x to NT 4.0," said Giga analyst Laura DiDio.
In the areas of performance, reliability and administration capability, NetWare beat NT hands-down, Giga says. Customers surveyed found NT 4.0 to have "far less horsepower, load balancing and scalability capabilities than NetWare 4.0 and 5.0," the study finds.
In terms of reliability, "IS managers said that it's no contest," according to the Giga note. "At this point, their NetWare servers can generally go weeks and even months without crashing. By contrast, it has been widely reported that many businesses must reboot their Windows NT 4.0 Servers sometimes on a daily basis."
Microsoft: Not exactly
Microsoft refutes the Giga claims in all three arenas: horsepower, reliability and administration. Khanna said that recent benchmarks from Mindcraft Inc., among others, have found NT to outperform NetWare on a variety of fronts. He added that Giga's claim that NetWare can support more clients per server than NT is not necessarily true.
"We have some customers with over 5,000 clients connected to a single or clustered NT server," he said. "Even 10,000 clients potentially could use just one or two NT servers."
And in terms of administration, Novell's ZENworks requires administrators "to touch every desktop" to install client software, Khanna claims, a cost Giga did not factor into its equation.
Microsoft does acknowledge "that planning up front is needed," as is "getting your domain structure correct" prior to any migration effort, Khanna said.
Microsoft has published various white papers and guides for its resellers and customers to help them in moving from NetWare to NT, as well as in moving from NT 4.0 to 5.0, Khanna points out. In these papers, Microsoft's message remains constant: If you want to insure an easy migration to Windows 2000, the surest method is to move to NT 4.0 today
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