Welcome to the personal website of Filip Stojanovski

Contrast Novell NetWare with Windows NT

Novell is a company traditionally oriented at networking. Incorporated in 1983, its official documentation claims that it helped create the LAN market (Novell, 2000). By comparison, Microsoft introduced network-oriented operating systems in the early nineties. The latest incarnation of its primary operating system product is called NetWare. It is advertised as building upon Novell’s tradition, and is one of the main competitors to NT on the LAN market.

In regard to basic costs, NetWare is sold at $595, with no need to purchase licensing per seat, while the price of NT server with (only) five client licenses is $1,195, and with 100 client licenses is $6,995 (Baltazar, 199b).

One of NetWare’s strong points is its "excellent capability" (Baltazar, 1999a) to manage users and groups, using a combination of security privileges. The part involved in user management is called Novell Directory Services (NDS), while the security privileges come as property rights, attributes, access rights and trustee assignments (Palmer, 1998, p.438). The array of rights and attributes supported by NetWare is larger than that of NT, and when the systems migrate from NetWare to NT, some of the specialized NT attributes are not converted (Palmer, 1998, pp.447-448). This does not mean that the possession of those attributes enables NetWare to exercise more control over a network than NT, but it sounds like that. This also translates in higher training costs for the personal. However, NDS is not supported in NetWare 5.0 (Baltazar, 1999a), which cripples it in comparison to Windows NT.

NetWare has 64-bit file system with larger maximum volume size and support for larger files size than NT, but lacks its other storage abilities, especially in regard to fault tolerance.

NT is often praised for its ease of use (Carr, 1988), and seems superior to NetWare in this regard. Although the newest version of NetWare also provides graphical user interface, much of the real configuring has to be done by editing configuration files (Baltazar, 1999a). When this is paired with the strong user base of Windows-adjusted users, who are familiar with the interface, it seems that NetWare is no match for NT in this regard. In addition, using NetWare requires installing Client Service for NetWare on all Windows NT workstations in the network, which increases the hassle.

In regard to the networking abilities, NetWare supports a variety of protocols, including native IPX/SPX and IP, with a range comparable to Windows NT. But, the server abilities make NT a more likely lead: NetWare comes bundled with Netscape’s web server, which offers less services than the one which comes with NT. Although NetWare supports Java, analysts do not consider it strong enough for large corporate applications or stronger computer configurations (Baltazar, 1999a).

In conclusion, NetWare showed some decent results in regard to benchmark testing, but seems to be no match to Windows NT (Table 1.1). Analysts who performed the test write that if the newer versions supported NDS and ZENworks, it would be even better (Baltazar, 1999b).

Table 1.1 Comparison of NT and NetWare (Baltazar, 1999b).

Works Cited

Baltazar, H. (1999). NetWare 5.0 Carves Niche in the Low End. PC Week 16, (19), 59-60. [Online]. Retrieved via Infotrack.

Baltazar, H. (May 10, 1999). Tests Show More Than Numbers. PC Week 16, (19), 49-52. [Online]. Retrieved via Infotrack.

Carr, J. (Feb. 1998). Which platform should you choose for e-commerce. [Online]. Retrieved May 1, 2000.

Novell. (2000). Investor Relations Fact Book –A History of Networking Leadership. [Online].

Palmer, M.J. (1998). A Guide to Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0. Cambridge, MA: Course Technology.