Novell will make 'immature' Linux robust and reliable (ComputerWorld)

Posted Apr 16, 2003 15:42 UTC (Wed) by sphealey (guest, #1028) [Link]

As an interested member of the lay (user) community, I am curious as to the typical reaction of IT professionals, many of whom have experience managing both Linux and Novell systems

First, is Novell reliable and scalable? Netware 3.11 was very reliable (I see plenty of it in use 5 years after its end-of-support date) but not very scalable. Netware 4.11 and 5.x are very reliable and scalable. NDS (aks eDirectory) is unbelievably scalable and quite reliable if engineered and maintained properly.

Are Novell products "more reliable" or "more scalable" than Linux? That is stretching it a bit in my eyes. Novell and Linux have historically served different markets and purposes. Novell serves the large-scale corporate market, where services such as NDS are necessary and useful. Linux (IMHO) typically handles the standalone-server or point application market, and has not fit well into corporate directory services and management tools.

There is also a bit of an issue where Linux advocates (at least in the past) have not had much experience with large, multi-site corporate networks, leading to statements concerning the usefulness or quality of NDS and its associated management tools (or Active Directory for that matter). Having worked in a large Netware environment I can tell you that NDS and Novell's model of permissions far surpass anything available for Unix. And let's not even talk about management tools.

But at the same time, Novell clearly missed the boat on appliation serving; there are essentially no serious business apps being developed to run natively on Netware anymore. Linux is clearly the leader in that arena.

I have long hoped that Novell would port NDS to Linux in a useful fashion, so that a "best of both worlds" solution could develop. I hope that this is the first sign of such a move. However, Novell has historically had the greatest technology in the world combined with the worst marketing and strategy, so I try to control my hope!

sPh