Novell Inc is strengthening its ability to link NetWare-based local area networks to minicomputers and mainframes, and other manufacturers’ workstations, such as those from Sun Microsystems and Apollo, to local networks with a series of new products, announced at Comdex in Atlanta this week. The new products have grown out of the company’s recent acquisition of three companies in the field. Novell announced an asynchronous bridge and a new asynchronous gateway. The asynchronous gateway links NetWare-based networks to resources on minicomputers from DEC, Data General, Hewlett-Packard, Prime and Tandem; the asynchronous remote bridge connects multiple remote NetWare-based networks to a local network over telephone lines, using high-speed modems. Novell also announced a series of new IBM gateway products, which have been developed by CXI Inc, a wholly owned subsidiary of Novell since the end of January 1987. These new products include a 40-session coaxial gateway, various local area network workstation gateway software and new software for PCOX gateways that support the NetWare SPX interface, all designed for access to data on IBM mainframes. In addition to CXI, Novell acquired SoftCraft Inc, a developer of database access languages for networks, on February 24 and Santa Clara Systems Inc, which develops network hardware products, on November 3, 1986.
