As expected, Novell Inc yesterday announced the next version of its Novell Directory Services (NDS), touting salability up to five times the current capacity of today’s users on the internet. The Provo, Utah-based networking giant said version 8.0 of NDS, code-named SCADS, can scale up to half a billion objects, compared with the earlier version, which showed signs of degradation after one or two million entries, according to Michael Simpson, Novell’s marketing manager. Simpson said Novell was working to push that figure to around one billion objects and plans to release data to that effect at the company’s Brainshare conference in Utah next week. Because of its salability features, version 8.0 will be more exclusively aimed at ISPs (internet service providers) and carriers compared to earlier releases. It’s also targeted at companies looking to set up e-commerce sites that will handle large numbers of users per day.
Novell’s news comes just a week after Oracle Crop announced its own directory services, Oracle Internet Directory. While it teamed up with Novell in the enterprise space, a second version of its directory will compete directly with Novell for the ISP/carrier space. But Simpson yesterday denied the two would have difficulty competing in one arena and collaborating in another. We’re close partners and our objective is to provide value to our customers, he said, if we compete in one area, it won’t effect our services in another. Simpson, who said Novell had kept details of the release deliberately under wraps, said version 8.0 of NDS raised the directory salability bar to new levels. Everyone’s trying to strive for the bar we’ve set…but we see ourselves as the main competitor. He added that Microsoft, which will release its own directory later this year, couldn’t catch up and compete with Novell unless they’ve got another five years.
Samson said the announcement was also significant because it marked the company’s shift from marketing NDS as something an organization needs to manage user authentication to selling it as a full service solution. We see ourselves moving more on to the internet and building communities of people, he said, if you look at e-commerce vendors, they’re all about tying people together by their relationships into groups. Now there’s no limit to NDS’ ability to be able to do that. He said there were very few architectural changes in the latest release, just very fine tuning. This isn’t about engineering, it’s about Novell starting to add the bells and whistles, delivering more and more applications that can take advantage of NDS. A license to use an open beta version of NDS release 8 is available today free of charge, Novell said, while existing NetWare 5 customers can download the software from http://support.novell.com/beta/public.
