Users press Cisco to give NDS a chance

By Christine Burns
Network World, 09/07/98

A growing number of Cisco customers are demanding the company give Novell Directory Services (NDS) equal play in the emerging high-stakes game of directory-enabled network management.

Sixteen months ago, Cisco hitched its wagon to Microsoft by agreeing to build proprietary extensions linking Cisco's router software to Microsoft's yet-to-be-released NT 5.0 Active Directory. The Networking Services for Active Directory suite of applications Cisco is developing will enable Active Directory to manage Cisco network devices.

Cisco's applications, for example, will make it possible for network managers to control how IOS services are delivered to individuals or groups of users. An administrator could use Active Directory to define how much bandwidth individual users could get to run multimedia applications.

But large-scale shops with Novell and Cisco gear are angry that Cisco is shunning NDS. They argue that NDS, with its 40 million installed seats, deserves as much, if not more, attention as Active Directory. Microsoft's directory is not expected to hit the streets until the middle of next year.

"If Cisco does not support NDS, I will buy something else," says Larry Bradley, a network manager at Georgetown University School of Business in Washington, D.C. "I am already looking at Cabletron as a replacement for my Cisco equipment, and Cisco's not supporting NDS would be the final nail in the coffin."

Tom Ferris, a network consultant at a Washington, D.C. financial institution, agrees. He currently uses NDS to manage 60 Novell servers and 3,500 end users, and spends upward of $1 million annually on Cisco equipment.

"Few would argue that the decision to develop to Active Directory was wise but not to the preclusion of NDS," Ferris says. "If Cisco's competitors begin introducing NDS-enabled products, then things will start to get very interesting. If Cisco officials were smart, they would look at NDS development as an opportunity rather than a threat, which it could become."

Ferris started a forum about native NDS support in IOS on Network World Fusion after several queries to Cisco officials regarding native NDS support went unanswered.

Without native NDS support in IOS, the options for NDS-enabled management of Cisco devices are both costly and cumbersome, says Mary Petrosky, an analyst with the Salt Lake City firm The Burton Group.

Charlie Giancarlo, senior vice president of Global Alliances at Cisco, says the internetworking company is investigating how to support multiple directory services to the full extent that it supports Active Directory. "But we are far from having an announceable product by any means," he says.

In the meantime, Giancarlo says NDS will be able to manage Cisco's products to some degree through both Cisco's and Novell's compliance with the Directory Enabled Network (DEN) initiative. This proposed standard is currently in development, with Cisco, Microsoft and Novell all contributing to the process.

But DEN will offer only limited management capabilities of Cisco devices while adding more complexity to customers' networks.

These caveats anger David Gersic, a systems programmer with Northern Illinois University (NIU) in DeKalb, who manages a 52-server NetWare 4.X network with 48,000 objects contained in its NDS tree. NIU also has five core Cisco routers on an ATM backbone that includes Cisco ATM and Ethernet switches.

"When dealing with two vendors that are central to our computing environment, why should we not expect them to work together and support each other directly, without going through another layer of software?" Gersic asks.

Additionally, it will take at least a year for the DEN specification to make its way through the standards process, says Ron Palmeri, Novell's vice president of strategic relations.

"We are dying to get ahead of that curve so that we can provide some really useful things like policy-based management, which NDS can already handle," Palmeri says.