By William Fellows

Novell Inc is porting its Novell Directory Service (NDS) to Compaq Computer Corp’s Tru64 Unix, which will give NDS important new exposure to enterprise markets according to CEO Eric Schmidt. Novell SVP corporate strategy, Chris Stone notes that Compaq has already committed itself to a two or three year development roadmap for Tru64 Unix on NonStop enterprise servers. He believes that the port to Tru64 will enable Novell to tap into lucrative markets on the back of Compaq’s Tandem NonStop servers running Tru64 Unix, such as Wall Street, which he says currently makes little or any use of directories. Tru64 currently runs on Alpha and is being ported to Intel Corp’s IA-64 architecture.

Novell is pulling out all the stops to get as big a footprint for NDS in the market as it can in advance of the introduction of Microsoft Corp’s competing Active Directory which will feature in Windows 2000. Compaq says that NDS give its users important cross-platform management opportunities, although it won’t be offering NDS out-of-the-box with Tru64. While Compaq will ship Active Directory with the Windows 2000 servers that it plans to introduce early next year, Novell argues that Active Directory is a Windows-centric environment and that NDS can be deployed to manage Active Directory-based networks.

Novell claims there are 40 million NDS users worldwide, the majority of them NetWare users, and the majority of those running on some 500,000 Compaq servers fitted with NDS. As a port for use on top of Tru64 Unix, NDS will be able to manage servers and network devices including printers whose details are stored in the directory. ZenWorks and other NDS-enabled applications will be supported. Novell claims the Intel version of NDS can store 1.6 billion entries and that there are over 100 ISVs writing applications for use with NDS.

Compaq is now offering its Intel-based ProLiant customers the ability to offload NDS’ CPU-hungry security tasks via a PCI AXL200 accelerator card from its Atalla subsidiary. Compaq says it will support NDS for Tru64 Unix under its Insight Manager XE application which provides web-based management of hardware and applications. Novell and third party single sign-on applications can be used on both, the companies say.

Meantime, Novell is currently working to create a single-source tree version of NDS which will provide the underpinning for future releases. That, says Stone, will halve the engineering time required to port NDS to each of the supported platforms, including NetWare, Linux Windows, NT and Solaris. The 32-bit NDS version 8, currently available on NetWare, is being used as the starting point for the single code base. It will be up on NT and Solaris by year-end. The NT and Solaris versions of NDS 8 will be the first that do not require a NetWare server to be present to support the directory service.

The Tru64 cut will be the first native 64-bit implementation of NDS. A port of NDS to Hewlett-Packard Co’s HP-UX is still on the list but is the most difficult of all, Novell says. Novell hasn’t yet decided whether it will bundle the directory enhancement tools it acquired with Netoria Inc in May with NDS. It is currently adding new cryptography techniques to NDS.

By year-end Novell also hopes to have launched its internet commerce framework called I-Chain which is designed to move corporate directories outside the firewall using an X.509-based certificate server. X.509 supports private a public key techniques and directory standard. The framework will be built out with Novell’s promised DirXML meta directory services and a digital identity recognition system. Generating certificates and linking them to directory services should enable companies to create supply-chain, CRM and e-business extranets.