Netware Version 5 Competitive Brief

Novell

1998

The #1 Network for Internet-Enabled Businesses

More than simply serving as a tactical operation, your network must forge a long-term, strategic foundation for your organization’s success. Today’s network must support the mission-critical activities your business depends on. It must integrate desktops; file, print, and Web services; best-of-breed client/server applications; fast and secure Internet access; data warehousing; and host systems. And it must include a management system that ties all of these components and resources together into a single, unified unit.

To ensure that you gain and maintain a competitive advantage, your network must provide an environment in which you can select the best-of-breed solutions … the applications, application servers, Internet servers and services, hardware, and other resources that make the most sense for your business. Integrating these solutions into the heart of your network infrastructure must be straightforward; furthermore, to ensure continued growth and competitive advantage in the future, your network must support tomorrow’s diverse and varied solutions.

Novell specializes in networking—making everything on the network interoperate and work to your best advantage. From its inception, Novell designed NetWare to run networks. NetWare 5 is the most advanced NetWare release to date. It is based on open standards and is the leanest, best integrated, and most highly optimized network you can implement … not only today, but also for years to come. It meets all the criteria necessary for today’s network, including directory-based management, pure IP, next-generation application support, and proven reliability, scalability, performance, and security.

Microsoft NT Server* and UNIX* servers are good application servers. Used as such, they can offer considerable benefit to your organization; however, NT was built from the ground up as a desktop operating system. While a desktop operating system can be stretched into application serving, it lacks the foundation required to provide the network management and reliable, scalable, high-performing, and secure network services that today’s businesses need. Trying to run today’s network on a server meant to run a desktop can dramatically increase your information technology (IT) budget and result in significant losses in productivity, competitive advantage, and security leaks for your business.

ABOUT NETWARE 5

Microsoft understands that NT lacks the management and network services required for today’s networking environment, and is trying to reengineer NT to incorporate and improve these essential capabilities. In trying to stretch a desktop operating system into a network server, Microsoft has ended up with little more than a general-purpose operating system with desktop roots. In fact, NT 5 code has ballooned to 40 million lines of code (according to The Wall Street Journal, June 26, 1998). This means that NT 5 will have four times as much code as NetWare 5. This additional code brings with it considerably higher hardware and memory requirements. And from what we can see from early beta releases, NT 5 will offer only a fraction of the NetWare 5 functionality and effectiveness.

NetWare 5 is lean, effective, and ready today. What’s more, NetWare 5 coexists easily with NT. If you want to take advantage of NT or UNIX as application servers in your network, you can do so today—while still enjoying the easier management and lower cost of network ownership that NetWare 5 delivers. Dave Kearns of Networking Solutions writes “…you no longer have to make an either/or choice—the two systems will coexist side by side with ease.” James Drews of Network Computing states, “Taking the plunge into integrating Windows NT and NetWare is a worthwhile undertaking. With it, you get the best of both worlds—a solid desktop operating system as well as a powerful back end. And integrating the two has gotten easier, with Novell picking up much of the administrative and management overhead.”

Your best bet for the future is to standardize your network on NetWare 5, the #1 network for Internet-enabled businesses, and use NT and UNIX as they were meant to be used—as application servers. Here’s why:

NETWARE 5 OFFERS SUPERIOR MANAGEMENT AND CONTROL OF YOUR ENTIRE HETEROGENEOUS NETWORK BY LEVERAGING THE WORLD’S LEADING DIRECTORY SERVICE

According to the AberdeenGroup, directory services are vital to the operation of a network. In fact, Aberdeen Group warns that no server operating system should be given serious consideration unless it has a strong set of directory services.

NT does not have a directory service. Like other applications servers that are not directory-based, NT has its own nonstandard management structure called domains. Domain-based management requires you to manage on a server-by-server, desktop-by-desktop basis. Protocols and even applications are treated as separately managed units. Users, likewise, are slaves to their PCs because user profiles are based on workstations, not user IDs. The redundancy of domain-based management makes the network difficult to manage and expensive to maintain.

With Novell Directory Services® (NDS™), the world’s leading directory service, NetWare 5 elevates both network and desktop management to the level of the network itself, which allows you to view and manage every resource on your entire network—regardless of the resource location or network size—from a centralized point.

In addition, users can literally take their desktops with them wherever they go. The login determines the desktop environment and access rights, not the workstation. This directory-based approach provides centralized and unified management of your entire heterogeneous network—delivering an average 69 percent savings in management and administrative costs over servers that are not directory based. (Server management savings are based on the average between the IDC estimate of 34 percent and the Gartner Group estimate of 40 percent, which is 37 percent. The remaining 32 percent is based on desktop management savings at customer sites using Z.E.N.works.)

Microsoft has been talking about the value a directory brings to the network for years, but the company has yet to deliver one. NT still does not have a directory, which is why Microsoft has been trying so hard to get Active Directory ready to ship. Even when Active Directory ships, its stability and scalability will be suspect. Additionally, it will be based on domains, so it will still not provide a true directory service.

In comparison, NDS has matured and progressed as a directory service for more than five years. It has proven itself in actual use by more than 40 million users. Thousands of applications run on it. And it can control the escalating costs associated with network and desktop management—alleviating up to 69 percent ongoing management time spent on administrative redundancies. NDS can even reduce those costs if you’re using NT. NDS for NT provides the directory structure for NT that Microsoft has yet to provide. So you can use NDS for NT to manage the awkward NT domain structure … and eliminate the need to manage two operating systems. According to the Gartner Group, “…enterprises that use NDS for NT rather than creating a duplicate domain structure will save at least 40 percent in duplicative administration and management costs per year.”

NETWARE 5 PROVIDES FAST, SECURE, AND EFFICIENT INTEGRATION BETWEEN YOUR BUSINESS NETWORK AND THE INTERNET

The Internet offers exciting opportunities for growth by enhancing and strengthening relationships with customers, suppliers, and other business partners. Yet many companies have been slow to leverage Internet technologies because they are concerned about security and slow performance. Most vendors provide only partial solutions to these problems. Microsoft, for example, is using NT as a network to connect to the Internet. However, rather than offering pure IP it tunnels the older NetBIOS protocol within the IP packet and uses WINS broadcasting. Tunneling and broadcasting are highly inefficient over wide area and Internet links.

NetWare 5 is the first and only network to offer pure IP. It bypasses the workarounds, providing direct, fast, safe, and efficient integration with the Internet. Pure IP frees up to 30 percent of your network bandwidth over today’s IP implementations, for an efficient and easier-to-manage foundation on which to leverage intranet, extranet, and Internet technologies. What’s more, the NetWare 5 Compatibility Mode and Migration Agent allow customers to move to a pure IP environment without the cost and disruption of ripping out and replacing the existing network infrastructure. And NetWare 5 integrates the DNS/DHCP utilities with NDS to make managing your IP world easy.

Additional Novell solutions that run on NetWare 5—such as BorderManager™ and GroupWise®—further enhance Internet access and performance, extending to the Internet the same high levels of security, universal access, and performance that customers have come to expect from a network. Both are fully integrated into the network through NDS. NetWare 5 also offers a capability that domain-based servers are simply not built to provide: the Novell FastTrack* Server (in partnership with Netscape). FastTrack is integrated with NDS and offers an unprecedented level of Internet performance, management, and security—easily and effectively extending the network to the Internet.

NETWARE 5 GIVES YOU A ROBUST AND SCALABLE PLATFORM FOR NEXT GENERATION, DISTRIBUTED APPLICATIONS BASED ON JAVA*, ORACLE8*, AND OTHER ADVANCED TECHNOLOGIES

Organizations select applications based on what users need to do their jobs. They need the freedom to choose the best possible applications in every category, from e-mail to databases. Furthermore, they want to ensure that all applications run efficiently and quickly on the network.

NetWare 5 gives customers flexibility in choosing applications and it optimizes the performance of applications on the network and the desktop. NetWare 5 ships with Oracle8 and offers a robust new multiprocessing kernel, memory protection, virtual memory, and increased fault tolerance. In addition, it gives millions of Java developers the world’s fastest server-side Java Virtual Machine (JVM), a rich set of networking services, and a host of other new application tools. These capabilities combine to make NetWare 5 a scalable, high performance platform for running next-generation distributed database and network applications.

NT does support a wide range of Windows-based applications. With NetWare 5, customers are not locked into a single-vendor solution, but have the flexibility and freedom to easily integrate (and manage) NT and other applications (such as UNIX-based applications) by running them within a NetWare 5 network. Because NetWare 5 and NDS enable management of NT from a single directory, you won’t have the hassle and costs associated with managing two or three operating systems, and you won’t have to deal with the awkward NT domain structure.

NETWARE 5 OFFERS PROVEN NETWORK RELIABILITY, SCALABILITY, PERFORMANCE, AND SECURITY, BACKED BY THE LARGEST SUPPORT INFRASTRUCTURE IN THE WORLD

Unlike NT and UNIX application servers, NetWare 5 is an industrial-strength network with storage, print, management, directory, security, and Web services that are optimized for the network.

Microsoft downplays the importance of file and print services, calling them commodity technologies. In truth, file and print are two of the most critical core services that any network provides. Given the poor reliability, scalability, and performance of NT in these areas, it is little wonder that Microsoft downplays them.

File storage is an essential component of the network. Everything on the network uses the file system. A strong file storage system becomes even more critical as businesses increase their Internet usage. Web files are typically far larger than most files generated by word processing programs or even databases. With data doubling every 18 months, the need for the advanced Novell Storage Systems™ (NSS™) is greater than ever.

NSS is a next-generation, 64-bit file system that currently supports up to eight terabytes in a single file or volume. With NSS, there is no longer a direct relationship between the number of directory entries and RAM requirements.

The fixed memory footprint for NSS is eight megabytes of RAM, and file system mount/remount times are reduced from hours to just seconds. Customers who need a robust and reliable file system and who plan to implement Web access or publishing, or access and store other large data files, would do well to have NetWare 5 as their network.

Print services are also key to any network. When users can’t print, the IT staff is immediately inundated with complaints. Printer problems account for 75 percent of all calls to IT help desks according to IDC. NetWare has built a solid reputation for the best print services available. NetWare 5 strengthens this core service with Novell Distributed Print Services™ (NDPS™), which provides intelligent, bidirectional communications between users, printers, and administrators. NDPS connects printers to users automatically, offering users true plug-and-print capabilities for the first time. NDPS saves countless hours for the IT staff, enabling them to dedicate additional time and effort to more important activities.

Reliability, scalability, speed, and security are all hallmarks of the proven NetWare foundation. All four of these areas have been enhanced significantly in NetWare 5. Pure IP, a new multiprocessing kernel, memory protection, new levels of security with public/private key infrastructure and secure authentication services, new file and print services, and many other features deliver the highest levels of networking services available. In addition, Novell is building partnerships with other industry leaders to enhance these services even further. Working with Intel, for example, Novell now brings customers Intelligent I/O (I2O) servicing requests directly from LAN boards without occupying the main CPUÑonce again, improving network performance significantly.

Finally, NetWare 5 customers are backed by the largest support infrastructure in the world. Novell has trained and certified more than 500,000 Novell-certified networking professionals around the world, far outnumbering those of any other company. Novell developed the training infrastructure upon which Microsoft is just beginning to build its NT-trained professionals. Novell now has more than 1,250 Novell Authorized Education Centers (NAECs) around the world. Novell offers three different support packages that can be customized to match support to the precise needs of the customer, while Microsoft extends a one-size-fits-all approach to customer service.

CONCLUSION

A network is a sophisticated enabler of technology that has significant impact on your organization. Whether that impact is positive or negative depends on which network software you choose to run your network.

In a recent report, the Aberdeen Group pinpointed the pitfalls of running your network with NT:

“… a one-third decrease in performance … a fifty percent increase in management costs … workstation freezes, transmission drops, and constant re-booting needed to keep the server operational.” — AberdeenGroup OnSite Report ‘NT Migration Migraines: Migration Results’

NetWare 5 is the #1 network for Internet-enabled businesses. That’s because NetWare 5 does what NT can’t. NetWare 5 gives you a fully optimized network on which to base your organization’s success. It integrates and runs your entire heterogeneous network. It makes it easy and cost effective to manage everything on your network—including UNIX and NT application servers—as one network. It delivers a pure IP environment without the cost and business disruption of ripping and replacing your existing network infrastructure. It gives you the competitive advantage of next-generation application support—with the freedom to choose best-of-breed application servers, including UNIX and NT. And NetWare 5 delivers reliable, scalable, high-performing, and secure network services at every level of your network. When you add it all up, NetWare 5 offers significant value to your business and more than 60 percent lower cost of network ownership to your IT budget.

Get more of the facts: For a full look at the value NetWare 5 can offer your organization, see the latest news and information at the http://www.novell.com/netware5 web site.

© 1998, Novell, Inc. All rights reserved.
Novell, NetWare, GroupWise, ManageWise, Novell Directory Services, and the Novell logo are registered trademarks, and BorderManager, NDS, Novell Storage Services, NSS, Novell Distributed Print Services, NDPS, Z.E.N.works, Open Solutions Architecture, and Yes Tested and Approved are trademarks of Novell Corporation in the United States and other countries.
Java and all Java-based marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc.; FastTrack is a trademark of Netscape; Unix is a registered trademark of X/Open Company Ltd.; Windows NT is a registered trademark and ActiveX, Visual Basic are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries.
All other brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
 

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