Novell Inc’s quest to strengthen its low end has continued with its acquisition of International Business Software Ltd, developer of Dataclub: Dataclub, as many Macintosh users will know, brought an interesting twist to the networking world when it introduced the concept of virtual servers. Each user on the network sets aside a portion of his or her machine’s disk for storing shared data, and all these reserved bits ‘club’ together to form a single logical disk space. One disadvantage of this is that the user doesn’t necessarily know where the data is stored, and network usage can end up being inefficient. Nonetheless the technology is innovative and interesting enough for Novell to pay $5.2m in cash for International Business’s equity (CI No 1,897). At the moment Novell is being a little cagey about exactly what it wants to do with the Dataclub code, probably it isn’t quite sure itself yet. In the short term International Business products will be sold through Novell’s worldwide distributors. In the longer term it has definite potential for NetWare Lite. Darrell Miller, the company’s executive vice-president almost said as much when he commented that IBS has developed excellent distributed file technology which can be incorporated into simpler networking solutions. Another possibility is that Novell will try to build a link between Mac and NetWare Lite networks.
