Brainshare 97

by Bob Walder

Whilst some would associate the French Riviera in May with the Cannes Film Festival, there are those of us who get their kicks "celebrity watching" at that altogether more salubrious event staged just a few miles up the coast in Nice – BrainShare.

Unfortunately, celebrities at Novell’s technical conference this year were a bit thin on the ground. Without wishing to denigrate Glen Ricart (Chief Technology Officer) or Denice Gibson (Senior VP Internet Products) in any way, it is a fact that attendees at the US BrainShare event held in Salt Lake City were treated to keynote presentations from Eric Schmidt (CEO), Joe Marengi (President), Vic Langford (Senior VP Internet Strategies), and Drew Major (Chief Scientist) in addition to the aforementioned duo. It is a little disappointing to note that Novell’s European customers do not merit the same consideration as those in the US.

Next Generation IntranetWare

If the lack of celebrities was disappointing, however, the wealth of new technologies on show more than made up for it.
One of the stars of the show was the forthcoming release of the IntranetWare operating system, code-named Moab. This brings a number of significant new benefits including native TCP/IP, an enhanced Multi-Processing Kernel (MPK), integrated DHCP and DNS servers managed via NDS, built-in Java support and a massively scaleable file system called Novell Storage Services (NSS).

For the first time, Novell customers will be able to run either or both native IPX and native TCP/IP across their networks, and will be able to employ a fully integrated DHCP and DNS solution which is currently the only one available to be managed completely via NDS. DNS domains are represented by containers within the NDS tree, and the DHCP server is BOOTP compatible (unlike some others we could mention!) Meanwhile, the inclusion of a Java Virtual Machine environment reinforces the concept of IntranetWare as an applications server platform, a position it can finally take officially now that UnixWare – together with the mixed marketing messages it engendered – has disappeared from the Novell product portfolio.

Novell Storage Services (NSS)

NSS is particularly intriguing, since it will eventually replace one of the most established, robust – not to mention speedy – file systems currently available. The Novell architects and developers have brought to bear their considerable experience gained from developing the NetWare file system in producing NSS. NSS is a true object file system with a 64 bit address space allowing it to support 2^64 (that’s 2 to the power of 64) directory entries (the current limit is 16 million), 2^64 volumes per server (the current limit is 16) and file sizes of 2^64 bytes (the current limit is 4.3GB). No matter what the application, data objects are accessed via a single "common layer" interface, with OS-specific functions provided by plug-in "semantic agents". The concepts of naming and storage are thus separated, and Semantic Agents can be written for any file system – including existing NetWare, native NSS, NFS, Web and Oracle to name but a few.

Individual logical data volumes can span multiple physical disks under NSS, which also provides a number of other benefits such as virtually instantaneous volume mount times (independent of volume size), fast failure recovery (no more VREPAIR) and sub-linear memory requirements, allowing huge volumes to be supported with minimal amounts of RAM. Despite these advances, NSS still manages to turn in a performance equal or better than the existing IntranetWare file system.

NDS is the Future

It is apparent from the architecture of NSS that it is designed to be ported to other platforms – and that is also the case for NDS. Novell announced proudly that it has achieved a 93 per cent common code base for its NDS product, leaving a mere 7 per cent to be ported across the three platforms currently supported – IntranetWare, UnixWare and NT.

All of a sudden, therefore, it appears as if IntranetWare itself becomes almost incidental to the company’s future plans – or at least as incidental as any operating system can be when it commands a 70+ per cent market share.

As far as the future goes, however, it looks like Novell is hanging its hat firmly on NDS, with IntranetWare "just another platform" on which the directory service runs. Software offerings appearing now are all designed to leverage the advantages of NDS and tend to include run-time versions of IntranetWare to allow them to run out of the box on a new machine – more evidence of IntranetWare as an applications server.

Border Manager

Take Border Manager, for example (recently renamed from Border Services). This encompasses a set of services which will provide customers with security, manageability and performance within the intranet and at the border between the corporate network and the Internet.

The product includes a packet filter firewall which can handle both IPX and TCP/IP traffic, the fastest proxy cache server currently available, circuit gateways, Virtual Private Networking (VPN), integrated DHCP/DNS and remote access capabilities. Once again, Novell's solution offers the unique ability to easily manage Internet access to the individual user level through NDS - all from a single point of administration across the enterprise.

Other areas where Novell will be butting heads with Microsoft include Java support – with Novell embracing Java wholeheartedly, while Microsoft looks in danger of missing the boat – and clustering. As Microsoft continues to shout about Wolfpack, Novell plods along rather too quietly with its Wolf Mountain project, which will include advanced clustering, 64- bit/Merced support, and advanced file system support. It will be interesting to see who makes it to market first with this one.

Rebirth?

Every year I tend to go into BrainShare with the feeling that Microsoft is getting the upper hand and that the writing is on the wall for Novell. And each year I come away thinking "Wow – if only they would tell people what they are up to….". Novell’s marketing machine has always been sluggish to say the least (how much publicity have YOU seen regarding Wolf Mountain, for example), but it finally seems to be waking up.

Look at the strategy for the new Novell Replication Services (NRS), currently entering the open beta phase. The plan is to make the shipping (not just the beta) version available free of charge for the first nine months or so, only charging for the product once version 1.1 is released. This is no feeble "freebie", however. NRS is a dedicated file system tool for replicating, distributing and synchronising information across a network of geographically dispersed servers, improving fault tolerance and making key files available for quicker access locally.

Now if Novell can continue to play Microsoft at its own game and flood the market with loads of "free" NDS-based software, it may once again find the tide turning in its favour.

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