While Novell Inc’s NetWare may be an admirable local network operating system in many ways, its facilities for inter-networking over wide area links can sometimes leave something to be desired. In particular, integrators have griped about the lack of a packet-burst facility – a technique for dramatically speeding the response times when dealing with remote systems. Now the Orem, Utah company is planning to remedy that particular shortcoming. Put simply, NetWare’s current way of interrogating a file server is to make a request, wait for a reply, make a request and so on. Fine for the local environment but badly flawed across wide area links where transmission delays become significant. Packet burst technology circumvents the problem by packaging a number of requests together and sending them in one burst without waiting for separate acknowledgements. Steve Rockov, area marketing manager with Novell UK said that news of the development had been circulating in the company for some months but the details of its implementation had yet to be decided. According to US reports, Novell is readying a NetWare Loadable Module that will significantly improve NetWare’s capabilities: currently it sends just one 512-byte packet at a time – the new facilities are expected to enable up to seven 1,024-byte packets be transmitted as a group. With the new facilities in place Novell will be better placed to compete with Microsoft Corp’s LAN Manager and Banyan Systems Inc’s Vines – which already have a burst mode. Rockov warned that it was still in the balance whether to launch a loadable module or build it in as a standard part of the operating system for future versions. System builders in the UK welcomed the news enthusiastically, said network specialist Richard Thomas: basically NetWare has been a pig to run over wide area networks… This is absolutely the thing I want.
