What does Novell mean by “Business Continuity”?

We’ve been looking at the upcoming NetWare 6.5 release (previously codenamed “Nakoma”) over the past few issues. So far, we examined the features being lumped together under the heading “Virtual Office”. The other two general areas are being called “Business Continuity” and “Web Services.” Eventually, I’ll have to talk about Web services (boy do I hate that phrase!), but not yet. For the next few issues, we’ll look at those areas that form the “Business Continuity” area of NetWare to see what’s new and what’s interesting.

Under this general topic, there are seven areas that include new, or improved, functionality. These are:

* Server consolidation Utility.

* Branch Office Manager.

* Storage-area networking w/ISCSI.

* Snapshot Backup.

* Patterned Deployment.

* Remote Administration.

* Environment Integration.

And I’ll bet you can hardly wait to find out what “Environment Integration” is all about. Just be patient and all will be revealed.

We’ll start, today, with the Server Consolidation utility (NetWare SCU). This is actually available now for NetWare 6 (https://download.novell.com/filedist/Download?buildid=1601). It was released after NetWare 6 and is a free add-on to it. With NetWare 6.5 it will ship in the box.

This is an outgrowth of the migration wizard used to upgrade from earlier versions of NetWare to 6.0. Today’s server hardware platforms are much more “resource-rich” than earlier versions. Huge amounts of RAM and seemingly limitless storage (through the use of network-attached storage or storage-area networks) mean that one server can do more. Additionally, there are the problems you face when a company is acquired or a merger takes place – often it’s easiest to simply bridge the two (or more) systems and hope you can get back to it later. You do this because traditionally it’s difficult (if not impossible) to merge two servers while retaining all resources, rights and privileges.

Well, the really neat thing about the SCU is that it will preserve file and folder trustee rights when you move the users and file system. That’s a really nice feature if not particularly new. But the SCU will also move printers and printer agents. Hallelujah! To top it off, this is all done with a simple, easy-to-use point and click interface. Click on a resource from a NetWare 4.x, 5.x or 6.x server and “drag-and-drop” it on any other 6.x server, click the “commit” button and it’s done. You can choose to scale the consolidation from very fine grained (move one file) to very coarse grain (move a volume), all with one click. That’s neat.

It’s not really new, but the SCU is something you’ll want to have. Branch Office Manager might also fit that description, as we’ll see next time.