NOS vendors battle it out

LAS VEGAS - A love fest it wasn't.

Executives from leading operating system vendors Novell, Microsoft, Sun, Red Hat and The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) engaged in a sometimes feisty debate about the future of their respective products in front of almost 400 NetWorld+Interop 99 attendees last week at Network World's Operating Systems Showdown.

The group did agree on one theme: Find a NOS niche and nail it. But after that, company executives conceded little else to each other.

Perhaps fittingly, operating system giant Microsoft opened the sparring session with the unpopular assertion that a single operating system - Windows 2000 Server - can be general-purpose enough to be an enterprise NOS, an application server and a development environment.

That claim didn't sit well with the other vendors or the panel of experts, which included International Data Corp. Vice President Rick Villars.

Fellow operating system vendor executives were only too happy to pepper Windows 2000 marketing chief Jim Ewel with questions about Windows 2000's delivery delays and reliability and the anticipated ad-ministrative hassles that could be associated with deploying Windows 2000's 40 million lines of code.

On the subject of reliability, Novell Chief Scientist Drew Major asked Ewel how many service packs Microsoft would have to re-lease before Windows 2000 could be considered stable.

"It will be stable when it ships," Ewel snapped.

Then Major asked if Microsoft was committed to shipping the server version of Windows 2000 by year-end.

Looking for a little wiggle room, Ewel said: "We are not so much committed to a date, as to a level of quality."

Sun Solaris executive Brian Croll asked Ewel if Microsoft would be willing to license the source code of Windows 2000 network components to all of the competitors standing on stage with him. Ewel an-swered: "I'm not sure why licensing code is necessary for interoperability. Windows 2000 is built on standards. That should be enough."

Taking the target off Microsoft, Novell's Major said his company will be pushing its flagship NetWare NOS as the best platform for supporting specialized server appliances such as caching, directory and storage-area network servers.

When asked if this move toward specialization meant that Novell was giving up on the application server market, Major said Novell would continue to fight that battle by delivering server-side Java support. If the market for server-side Java applications fails to materialize, "there is no Plan B," Major said.

Sun's Croll tried to get Major to tag team with him against Microsoft when he tossed this question in Novell's direction: "How important is Java compatibility across servers?" Croll was alluding to Microsoft's efforts to promote its own Java API set.

"Nobody wants the Balkanization in Java that there is in the Unix world," Major said.

On another hot topic, Sun's Croll pointed to published benchmarks he claimed proved that none of Sun's competitors could outshine the Solaris/SPARC combination for supporting high-end, mission-critical Web and database applications.

SCO's Tamar Newberger, director of server product marketing, wasn't fazed by Croll's claim: "But why do you keep selling SPARC when Intel is the clear chip winner?" she asked.

Newberger fired some other pointed barbs at her rivals. At one point she labeled SCO's competitors as "NetWare, beware, shelfware and nowhere," referring to the offerings of Novell, Microsoft, Red Hat and Sun, respectively.

Newberger repeatedly noted UnixWare's 80% chunk of the Unix/Intel market as evidence that SCO was ready to break out of its traditional small to mid-size business markets and make a mark in the enterprise network arena with new, more scalable renditions of UnixWare.

While Sun and SCO executives touted their operating systems' scalability, Red Hat ducked questions about Lin-ux's inability to support thousands of users.

Red Hat's top engineer, Erik Troan, was frank in his admission that the Linux 2.0 kernel "was not very scalable." But he said pending benchmark tests of the Linux 2.2 kernel running on eight-way SMP boxes that will be published in the next three to four months will surprise Red Hat's competitors. "Or maybe they will be disappointed," said Troan, implying that these tests would show Linux could outperform competing operating systems.

Troan argued that only open source Linux could help customers avoid "vendor lock-in."