Users praise NDS for NT

Managing mixed environments easier, cheaper, they say.

By Paul McNamara
Network World Fusion, 7/8/98

Novell's fledgling attempt to bridge the NetWare and Windows NT worlds with a common directory has been met with uncommon praise from early adopters.

Novell Directory Services for NT (NDS for NT) has effectively reduced administration workloads and costs in mixed NetWare/NT environments since shipping in December, customers said. Moreover, with Microsoft Corp.'s upgraded NT 5.0 and Active Directory being delayed, these users and industry analysts said NDS for NT gives Novell a prime opportunity to staunch the bleeding from its NetWare installed base.

NDS for NT "has been surprisingly clean and very efficient," said Phil Easter, technology strategist for Greyhound Lines, Inc. in Dallas. Predominantly a NetWare shop, Greyhound uses NDS for NT to manage 10 NT servers. This allows the company to "leverage existing [NDS] talent" already on staff, Easter said.

NDS for NT lets customers manage the administration and security of single or networked NT servers by moving NT user information into an NDS database. The server-side software consists of a single enhanced Dynamic Link Library placed on each NT Server that acts as a Primary or Backup Domain Controller. The product includes extensions for NWAdmin, Novell's administrative interface, which give NDS users control over the NT information.

Another customer called the tool particularly useful for companies whose corporate makeup is in flux.

"We're in merger mode and we do a lot of business with outside entities," many of whom use NT, said Don Clark, manager of client-server networking at Foundation Health Systems, Inc., in Rancho Cordova, Calif.

"There is a lot of cross-domain and trusted domain work," he added. "Setting up all those trusts is so much easier when you have one single point where all of our people can do all of their job from."

Clark estimated that NDS for NT is already saving Foundation Health $150,000 annually in personnel costs, and he expects that to rise to half a million once 6,000 more NT users are brought into the system. Foundation Health has 214 NetWare servers and 55 NT servers.

Consolidation of account management is key, according to Peter Cruikshank, a systems engineer at the U.S. Navy's Spawar Corporate Information Systems Office in San Diego. Spawar has 100 NetWare and 20 NT servers.

"Right now we have NDS accounts, NT accounts, [Microsoft] Exchange accounts, Unix accounts, [Lotus] Notes accounts," Cruikshank said. "When a user leaves it could take four or five administrators to make sure that we actually wipe that user out."

"If I can do my directory synchronization through one product that should cut down on bandwidth [consumption], replication errors, those types of issues," Cruikshank said.

Although the first release of NDS for NT must be run on a NetWare server, Novell intends to ship a native NT version later this year.

Spawar has conducted successful tests of the current NDS for NT, Cruikshank said, and plans a production deployment when the native version is available. Greyhound's Easter said he believes that option also will open doors for Novell into all-NT shops.

"They probably won't say it publicly, but behind closed doors I am sure a lot of these [NT administrators] are excited about the possibility," said Easter, "just because of the pain it has been over the past couple of years to manage these large NT networks."

Novell has twice slashed the price of NDS for NT, first in March from $65 a node to $26 and then to $16 in a promotion that runs through July. The pricing "tripled sales in the first month after the announcement was made," according to Michael Simpson, director of marketing for Novell's Internet Infrastructure Division. He declined to provide more specific sales figures.

With shipment of NT 5.0 and Microsoft's much-ballyhooed Active Directory not expected until next year, Novell has a clear window of opportunity to exploit, according to Tim Sloane, an analyst with the Aberdeen Group, a Boston-based consultancy.

"The longer it looks for Active Directory [to be delivered], clearly it gives NDS an opportunity to shine," Sloane said.