Novell Inc executives tell us that as well as unveiling a second beta of Moab, NetWare 5, the company will also provide some insight into what its technology gameplan will look like through 1998 and beyond to the 64-bit NetWare 6. Like other system software vendors, Novell will target NetWare 6, currently know as Park City – a ski resort town in Utah – for Intel Corp’s 64-bit Merced processor which is due in systems in the second half of 1999. The company wouldn’t be drawn on how much backwards compatibility Park City will offer for 32-bit NetWare applications but it is slated to include a fully distributed file system. Novell’s currently working up a full complement of end- to-end Java, Corba and ActiveX technologies integrated with its NDS and LDAP directory services plus Java implementations of GroupWise (reportedly dubbed Jericho); ManageWise (Houston); BorderManager (Golden Gate) due by year-end. Alongside IP- and Java-enabled NetWare, the Netscape-enabled NetWare and web server products created by Novonyx are also expected to play a pivotal role here as well as the company’s OSA Open Solutions Architecture application development environment. Meantime, Novell’s 16-way Wolfpack-killer, its Orion clustering technology (CI No 3,264), is to ship as NetWare Cluster Server by year-end following a summer beta program, enabling Novell services to be shared across nodes. Orion II due in 1999 will add Java and internet clustering and automatic parallelization of applications. Novell envisages clustering a couple of hundred or more 32-way systems by 2000. It’s also going to talk about a new release of IntranetWare for small businesses next week.
