Bay, Netscape, Novell team on policy-based nets

Paris - Bay Networks Inc. has teamed up with Netscape Communications Corp. and Novell Inc. to develop policy-based networking software that will work with the two companies' directory services, officials said here yesterday at the NetWorld+Interop trade show.

Bay will work to make sure its IP routing software - which includes policy-based technology to allow users to allocate which applications are given priority on a network - will work with Netscape's Directory Server software, said Graeme Allan, managing director of Bay U.K. To make sure that Bay's IP routing software works with Netscape's Directory Server, Bay will develop products based on the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), the directory protocol on which Directory Server is based, Allan said.

Since LDAP is becoming a standard for IP-based directory services on the Internet, Bay is keen to adopt the technology as part of its IP-based strategy, officials said. Bay's IP routing software allows network managers to assign certain levels of network resources to different applications on a network. For example, an enterprise accounting application would be allocated more resources than a video conferencing application, since it is more critical that a financial application is delivered reliably and consistently, Allan said.

In addition to making its IP routing technology compatible with LDAP, Bay will also work to integrate it with Novell Directory Services (NDS), said Andrew Sadler Smith, U.K. and Ireland deputy managing director of Novell. Bay will work with Novell to make sure its IP-based policy routing software will interoperate with NDS, officials said. As with Netscape Directory Server, the interoperability between Bay's software and NDS will be based around LDAP, which Novell is deploying across NDS, officials said.

In other news, Bay announced that it has joined the Directory Enabled Network initiative, an industry effort involving over 20 networking, hardware and software companies aimed at integrating directory services more directly into networks to allow diverse network applications to interoperate, Bay officials said. Some of the initiative members to date include Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Compaq Computer Corp.