Novell Inc has begun briefing large corporate users on a five-year plan to build distributed computing into its NetWare network operating system, and is working with Carnegie Mellon University to develop Open Software Foundation Distributed Computing Environment support in NetWare. It will offer DCE support as add-ons in a series of phased releases. The first offering, not expected until the end of the year, is a NetWare Loadable Module. This will enable users to access DCE file systems transparently. The user logs on, is identified by the system and will be able to access both Distributed Computing Environment file systems and NetWare simultaneously. It will undertake core functionality like remote procedure calls, security and DCE threads within the NetWare server. If DCE is accepted as a de facto standard, Novell says it may embed the modules in NetWare, although it says this is unlikely to happen unless the Foundation reviews its licensing fees for the thing, currently running at some $2,500. Meantime US PC Week reports that Novell is working on a plan to redesign NetWare to distribute CPU-intensive processing tasks among several computers -including idle or lightly used low-end ones that are normally used as clients. Once the data has been processed, it’s sent back to the primary server, which collects and collates it before sending it to the user that requested it. The paper suggests that a compute-intensive modelling application could be run on a server, but specific tasks could be delegated to computers that normally handle only word processing, and network adminstrators could speed up processing without buying expensive new hardware, although applications would have to be modified to work with the new system.
