NetWare everywhere: Promise or pipe dream? - Novell's plan to challenge Microsoft - Cover Story

Software Magazine, June, 1995 by Elizabeth Harding

"The fact that Novell started in the market by selling [for small networks] and not enterprise shows," said Joaquin Gonzalez, executive vice president and service director of the Meta Group's Global Networking Strategies Division. "They did annoying things like stick with IPX [transport] too long. If Novell could get rid of some annoying artifacts from the past, they would be in a tremendous position to establish leadership in directory services - which may mean the whole game."

Advice comes from other quarters as web. "Novell has to maintain its customer base long enough to get out a new network and application server operating system for the client/server world," said Richard Finkelstein, president of Performance Computing, a Chicago-based consulting firm. "They have to concentrate on consolidating the new networking strategy and come out with a stable operating system before NT can reach critical mass. Microsoft is chipping away, and it will continue to do so over the next year or two. There arc fewer and fewer reasons to go to Novell."

Novell, said Finkelstein, must extend Netware to create what he calls a "real operating system." Today, NetWare is "an unprotected operating system because it fails to address such functions as preemptive scheduling and virtual paging."

In March 1994, Novell disclosed that its engineers were working on a new distributed network operating system called SuperNOS, based on NetWare and Novell's UnixWare. "The work we're doing on SuperNOS brings together the best of both worlds," said Frankenberg. "Customers will have a choice - UnixWare, NetWare or a combination of both - in SuperNOS."

However, Novell officials acknowledge that the first SuperNOS products won't begin shipping until 1996. "I don't expect [products to ship] for another two years," said Finkelstein. "If Windows NT LAN Manager gets critical mass, everybody will cross over. Novell has to hold that off." Some pieces of the SuperNOS technology, such as a common protocol stack and a common set of drivers, were incorporated in Netware 4.1

"I'm excited about two major technologies we're working on," said Novell's Chief Scientist Drew Major, key developer of the original NetWare. "One is SuperNOS, and the other is a new file system [Novell Advanced File System] that has intelligent storage and capabilities of managing storage." Pieces of the Novell Advanced File System will be incorporated in the next release of NetWare, said Major.

Novell engineers are also improving the NetWare infrastructure using the Tuxedo TP Monitor acquired with USL, Major said. "We're integrating key Tuxedo technology with NetWare," he said. "NDS will use technology components such as message queuing and transaction control" for managing distributed applications.

Tuxedo will be available as a NetWare Loadable Module (NLM) in June. "We're targeting the next generation of distributed applications," said Major. "Networking is where most of the new value-add of the industry is coming from. We're a networking company, though we purchased some non-networking companies."