With all the attention Banyan’s stripped-out Enterprise Network Services service package has been getting of late, Banyan Systems Inc, Westborough, Massachusetts has been coming under fire about its future commitment to the network operating system but in the new 6.0 release of Vines (CI No 2,656), additions to the operating system and to Enterprise Network Services for NetWare include Distributed Enterprise Management Architecture or DeMarc; a Windows implementation of Hewlett-Packard Co’s OpenView network management system; and enhancements to the Intelligent Messaging III and StreetTalk III Global Directory. StreetTalk III includes Guaranteed Login, whereby StreetTalk groups on a ‘home server’ can have up to two ‘shadows’, so that should the Enterprise Network Services server where the StreetTalk database is resident go down, it can be mirrored to another server in the network. The shadow databases are read-only but Banyan provides a utility to convert these to read-write functionality if the home server database gets destroyed. Banyan has doubled the number of groups and organisations available in StreetTalk to 50 from 25. Unlike previous versions of Vines and Enterprise Network Services for NetWare, versions 6.0 will have Intelligent Messaging rolled in. Also bundled with Vines 6.0 is Enterprise Backup & Restore 1.0, which enables automated back-up from a Windows personal computer on a network which has Enterprise Backup & Restore agent software, though the service resides on a server with attached tape drive. Vines and ENS 6.0 support Santa Cruz Unix, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris and NetWare; server prices go from $3,000 for 10 users, $50,000 for 1,000 users. Enterprise Network Services for Windows NT is also on the way.
