I like what I see at the new Novell

So as I was saying, spam is . . . just kidding. After three columns on the topic - and despite the huge feedback - my editor has threatened me with grievous bodily harm if I don't move on to a new topic this week.

First, a thank-you to Bob Patterson and the IT group at Union Switch & Signal for their hospitality. They won me (and my esteemed editor, the ever-beguiling Mr. Dix) in the "Win Gibbs for a day" contest. Union Switch & Signal has a professional setup and an eye on the future. Guys, if you enjoyed it half as much as we did, then we enjoyed it twice as much as you.

If I had to give one bit of advice to the Union Switch & Signal IT group, it would be this: Consider NetWare. I just spent two days at Novell and came away with a new respect for NetWare.

Novell's biggest problem lies in communicating just how damn clever it is. Over the course of my visit, I heard about all of Novell's major offerings - and it was about a tenth of the time needed to really cover the products in detail.

While most of the products were impressive, the big story is NetWare 5. NetWare 5 has a huge list of improvements, including Novell Storage Services (NSS).

If you have mounted a large (multigigabyte) NetWare volume, you know it is a slowwww process and requires a lot of RAM. With NSS, mounting 100G bytes takes less than 30 seconds. Novell claims to need only 4M bytes of RAM for a 500G-byte volume with 20 million files - and that includes the RAM needed to load NSS! All in all, the product is an amazing improvement over previous releases.

Another way cool feature is the embedded Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The Novell JVM is reputed to be one of the fastest on the planet and offers third-party developers a completely new set of opportunities.

There is a lot more technology that is either an important change (pure IP support), a major upgrade (the new security architecture is mind-numbingly huge) or a hot new service (the embedded JVM), but it is Novell Directory Services (NDS) that is the convincing edge that NetWare has over Windows NT.

And when you see what NDS brings to Windows NT in the form of NDS for NT 2.0, it's hard to figure out why you'd want to run an NT network without it. All of those clumsy contortions required to configure user rights under NT's domain system are obviated with NDS for NT. And for $29 per NT server, I don't think it's a hard decision.

"Hold hard, Mark," you might be saying, "don't you need a NetWare server?" Well, you're correct. A NetWare server is currently required for the master copy of the NDS database, but Novell is threatening to remove that issue in a near future release. In the meantime, you can run a NetWare 4.0 run-time system.

"Yeah, but I don't want to learn NetWare," you say. "I've got enough to manage already." Well, from what I've seen, learning to drive NetWare and NDS for NT will pay for itself by reducing the management burden imposed by NT domains.

"What about Microsoft's Active Directory Services (ADS)?" you might also be asking. From what I've seen of ADS technology so far, Novell doesn't have a technical challenge on its hands, simply a marketing challenge.

At the event, I ran into an old friend who works for Novell. He told me that if I'd held on to my Novell stock options, they'd be worth more than $3 million today. Well, tomorrow I'm going to buy some Novell stock. What I saw last week makes me think Novell's future is a good bet.

Send investment advice to nwcolumn@gibbs.com or (800) 622-1108, Ext. 7504.