Screaming Penguin

Novell has finally decided to give up the fight, sorta. Back in the day (10 years or so ago) Novell was the king of file servers. That said its important to realize that that is what it was and that was ALL it was. Novell then went on to offer other services and try to make apps run on Novell, etc, etc, etc, none of it has ever worked in the marketplace. Novell is STILL a great file server, but again, thats ALL it is. I used to administer a large Novell installation (for a large customer of IBM, I was with IBM at the time) and the reason I started looking away from Novell was because we required other servers to be in the network room to run applications and provide network services (apps, DHCP, DNS, etc). These other servers mainly ran Windows NT, AIX and Linux. These other servers were all of course also capable of being file servers. Therefore it was cumbersome and illogical to continue to pay for, support and maintain Novell AND another several types of server operating systems. (Not to mention the debacle of IPX/SPX and all the Novell CLIENTS that had to be maintained on each workstation, yes Novell did finally come over to the TCP/IP light, but this was before that time). It was my recommendation on many occasions that we dump Novell, not because it wasnt any good, but because it was simply not needed and it was too much of a pain to maintain multiple server environments and multiple clients (we did not run any network services or apps on Novell, this you admittedly CAN do, but come on, its not the forte of Novell). I left the account before they switched away from Novell but I think it did eventually happen. This story is probably similar to a lot of Novell customers. Novell is good but its just not required anymore and its a pain to maintain Novell servers just for file services and NDS, etc. The latest move by Novell makes sense to me, but it may be too little too late. Novell is now showcasing a Linux migration path. Thats right, Linux. Rather than have to run Novell servers with a Novell kernel they are saying you can run our services on the Linux kernel. That clears up some of the mess, that means that if you have existing Linux servers you can put your Novell stuff there and get rid of the separate Novell hardware and OS junk. Thats good, but I think the argument still remains intact that if you already have a server such as Linux that can act as a great fileserver, why do you need Novell? Its an interesting tack and one that I think will improve the viability of Novell even if its still not a totally compelling case. For more see the linked article.   Novell adopts Linux as NetWare migration path: Computerworld