Novell Inc is the latest company to pledge its support for the Internet Protocol Multicast standard and has announced its executive membership to the standard’s Initiative consortium. The Provo, Utah-based company is incorporating the standard in Novell Netware 3.1, 4.x and IntranetWare and believes it is proving its commitment to what it describes as the most advanced networking technology available. The Multicast standard was established by Stardust Technologies Inc last October to address the problems of overcrowding on the Internet and the corporate intranet (CI No 3,019). Since then it has gained increasing momentum and seen new members joining on a regular basis; eleven new companies signed up in February (CI No 3,107). Novell will join the likes of Hewlett Packard Co, Microsoft Corp, Sun Microsystems Inc and Cisco Systems Inc. Novell believes it is now in a position to offer its customers an internet and intranet system that is easier to manage, cheaper to run and requires less bandwidth capability. IP Multicast applications send one copy of the information to a series of pre-arranged addresses to only those who have requested it. Without Multicasting, the same information is carried over the network, sending multiple copies to all the addresses, thus requiring much higher bandwidth. IP Multicast can be downloaded free from Novell’s Web site, as part of its TCP/IP stack. To access the page, carry out a search for TCPN03.EXE at http://www.support.novell.com.
