Novell Inc yesterday released the worldwide open public beta of NetWare 5.1, formerly code-named Cobra, which is the first version of the company’s network operating system to come with its Novell Directory Services (NDS) integrated as standard. Version 5.1 comes with the newly-released NDS 8, which is Novell’s first internet-enabled directory product, having the capacity to scale to half a billion objects. As expected, the OS also comes with both IBM’s WebSphere Application Server 3.0 standard edition and IBM’s WebSphere Studio 3.0 entry edition as well as Netscape’s Enterprise Server web server and a five-user license of Oracle Corp’s 8i database.
According to Michael Bryant, director of NetWare product marketing, Netware 5.1 is Novell’s most ambitious version of the product to date. He said the OS features three major improvements over version 5.0. The first, thanks to the integration with NDS, is manageability. In addition to enabling a greater number of objects on the NDS tree, Novell has also introduced a management portal to enable administrators to manage their Netware server over the web. The web services have also been improved via the inclusion of Novell’s version of Netscape’s web server. Now you can have all the web users running on top of Netware and leveraging all the things that the OS is best known for including its performance, reliability and scalability, Bryant said.
Finally, this latest release also marks Novell’s push to position Netware as an application platform, Bryant said. The partnership with IBM and with Oracle are both ways to getting more applications on the the Netware and NDS platform that weren’t necessarily developed on top of either, he says. Now it doesn’t matter which environment they were written in, the applications can still run on Netware 5.1 just the same, which is new for Novell, Bryant said.
NetWare 5.1 also includes native support for LDAP v3, the protocol that allows customers to access directory information from many different directories. Customers, partners and resellers may obtain a license to use the NetWare 5.1 public beta by contacting Novell at http://www.novell.com/netware5>http://www.novell.com/netware5. The cost for the NetWare 5.1 beta software license is $15 plus shipping and applicable taxes. Pricing and availability of NetWare 5.1 will be announced at a later date, the company said.
