Lucent tags NDS for directory-enabled wares

By Christine Burns
Network World Fusion, 10/19/98

Lucent and Novell unveiled plans to integrate Novell's Directory Services (NDS) with Lucent networking hardware. Their goal is to help corporate users gain tighter control over their switches and routers via the directory.

Lucent and Novell announced a software licensing deal under which Lucent will bundle and integrate NDS with management software currently shipping with its Cajun P550 Switch, a Layer 2 switching/Layer 3 routing Gigabit Ethernet product.

This integration will allow administrators to use Novell's directory administration tool, NWAdmin, to define user and application access to network services delivered by Cajun 550 switches. For example, an administrator can make sure that the company CEO gets guaranteed bandwidth service from all Cajun switches regardless of where that person is logged on to the network. Likewise, an administrator can use NDS to dictate that videoconferencing applications run over exclusively dedicated lines so as to not affect the quality of other networked services.

This policy-based functionality is also scheduled to be available for the other members of Lucent's Cajun Campus product line, plus additional offerings in the company's data networking enterprise portfolio, over the next 12 to 18 months.

The Cajun P550, which Lucent bought earlier this year from Prominet Corp., competes with Cisco's line of Catalyst 8500 switches.

While his Washington, D.C.-based financial institution doesn't currently use Lucent hardware, network analyst Tom Ferris said the NDS integration could warrant him taking a second look at their products. "We've never had much of a relationship with Lucent in the past, I think we'll have them in to discuss this strategy," Ferris said.

This announcement is a direct hit on Microsoft's efforts to provide similar integration between its yet-to-be released NT 5.0 Active Directory Service and networking hardware from Cisco. This partnership was announced more than 18 months ago, but its fruition has been delayed by the late release of NT 5.0, which is not expected to hit the streets until sometime in the second half of next year.

"The answer to our positioning [the Lucent partnership] against the work that Microsoft and Cisco are doing is easy. Ours works today," said Chris Stone, senior vice president of strategy and corporate development for Novell.

Both Novell and Lucent will be demonstrating the union of its products at their separate booths during the NetWorld+Interop trade show in Atlanta later this week. This capability will be delivered by Lucent in the first half of 1999 as an enhanced policy management application.

However, industry observers note that Lucent's market share hardly can compare with networking hardware leader Cisco. Novell must forge ahead with additional partnerships with other networking hardware vendors such as Cabletron, Nortel Networks and 3Com in order to compete against the industry hype surrounding the Cisco/Microsoft partnership. Cisco has said in the past that the only integration it will offer with NDS will be through industry standards such as the Directory Enabled Network (DEN) specification, which is currently working its way through the Desktop Management Task Force process. The DEN specification includes a standard approach to defining schema for integrating network equipment, such as switches and routers, with a directory service.

Stone says the Lucent and Novell work will conform to the DEN specification and the two will likely propose extensions to it as a result of their collaboration. The two companies are further demonstrating their commitment to industry standards by agreeing to use the industry standard Lightweight Directory Access Protocol for interfacing NDS with Lucent's products.