Linux Growth Doesn't Offset NetWare Decline

steveit_is writes to tell us CommentWire is reporting that the decline in NetWare and Open Enterprise sales is plummeting at a much faster rate than their SUSE Linux sales are growing. It seems that the transition is proving to be every bit as difficult as Novell execs originally suspected. From the article: "When Novell last week announced its financial results for the fiscal first quarter ended January 31, the said that growth in its SUSE Linux and related products was decent, but that sales of its NetWare and Open Enterprise Server--a variant of NetWare that uses Linux as the operating system kernel that was announced last year--declined by 11%."

Re:Novell History, for those that forgot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong.

Novell was not involved in mainframes.

It started out at the dawn of the 80s making microcomputer trinkets, and eventually became successful selling Netware - which it survives on to this day.

Netware, support hell

[Anonymous Coward]

the decline in NetWare and Open Enterprise sales is plummeting at a much faster rate than their SUSE Linux sales are growing. It seems that the transition is proving to be every bit as difficult as Novell execs originally suspected.

At $DAYJOB, We've had all kinds of trouble since 5.1. The problems are so signifigant that we've gladly paid Novell to send an engineer to look over the problem at $2,000 per day. To date, the suggestions have been... less than hoped for.

The main problem seems to be memory management in versions after 5.1. The problems are so bad that we are actively looking at moving to Microsoft AD, because it's obvious that Novell can no longer support +15,000 users and +30,000 workstations. Indeed, anything over 100,000 objects in a single container are trouble.

Gee, I used to manage four times that with Kerbros, YP, and rsync. For free. With no trouble. But, hey, Unix is "old technology" and needs to be replaced. So says Management, anyway. I still haven't seen the convergent force field heating systems, so I guess I have to heat my dinner the old fashioned way: wood, coal, charcoal, stove or microwave. Fate forfend that I have to use dung chips. They leave such an after taste.

Re:The real problem

[Anonymous Coward]

*Troll snagged* I am an OES admin in a 1500+ user environment, and I can tell you that eDirectory on OES Linux is anything but half-baked. It is very, very feature rich and secure. We are having some great successes with the product. Myself (Linux admin background) and my partner in crime (Netware admin background) are very happy with the very low admin overhead we have in a pretty complex environment. Our favorite part about OES is all the services that come bundled with the OS that is included in our MLA. Half the time when we come up with a great idea or our users request some kind of feature we are finding that we already own the software that can make it happen. We are rolling out iFolder 3 and eGuide currently and they are working great. We have moved one of our Groupwise Post Offices to OES Linux and it is running rock solid. I will put my Netware/OES shop up against any M$ or Redhat shop any day of the week as far as labor costs and software costs and downtime. It kills me when I read comments like "Half-Baked" blah blah...But unfortunately as we all know, the better technology does not always win. I have told my PHB that when they are ready to pull the trigger on AD I will be happy to go get my MCSE...hey for me, M$ means double or triple our staff and job security...

Re:Netware, support hell

[Bradac_55]

That's what happens when you do not have the foresight or skill to upgrade from
an older version of Netware. I've run large scale Netware 5.5 and 6.0 operations
with 30k+ workstations without needing help from Novel or having "memory
management" issues.

NetAdmin has always made MS AD look like the short bus stepson of the networking
industry. I just can't take anyone serious that says they are looking at MS
products after taking the time to work with and *learn* any of the Unix platforms.

I am actively moving to the Suse platform but it's not because Netware sucks, it's
because it will no longer be supported.

No Y2K bug that I saw.

[khasim]

I just replaced two NetWare 4.11 servers in 2005. They were running just fine.

I was consulting back in 1999-2000 and I never saw any Y2K problems with NetWare.

Re:Apples and Oranges....

[hendersj]

> alright, so it was based on DOS, but for all intensive purposes,

<sigh>

NetWare uses DOS as a bootstrap. Period. The engineers at Novell who developed the loader mechanism back in the NetWare 3 days (NetWare 2.15 didn't use DOS as a bootstrap, though you could run non-dedicated mode and have a second "session" that ran DOS so the machine could be used as a workstation as well) decided that since DOS already gets a system started up, there was no need to reinvent the wheel.

SERVER.EXE loads from DOS; the NetWare kernel takes over, and DOS is left there for real-mode access to the floppy drive (and CD-ROM drive IFF you loaded the CD-ROM driver stuff in DOS before loading SERVER.EXE - this was common for installations back before access to CD-ROM drives were standardized and a lot of the drives used funky proprietary cards that needed special drivers rather than a standard, universal IDE or SCSI interface). Once the NetWare kernel takes over, DOS is not necessary; the fact that there has been a REMOVE DOS command on NetWare demonstrates this (though this has been removed from NetWare 6.5 and OES/NetWare and may even have been removed from NetWare 6; it was there to increase the memory pool in earlier versions because memory was so expensive in the past; now with memory as cheap as it is, there's no need to conserve that extra couple hundred K that DOS uses).

Nothing personal here, I just get tired of people making uninformed assertions like this - and there are several people here who have incorrectly made this comment because they assumed they knew how it worked rather than learning how it worked. NetWare IS NOT a DOS application, but lots of people believe very firmly it is. The NetWare *loader* is a DOS application.