By William Fellows
Syntax Inc, the Unix-to-PC connectivity company is not mincing its words. It says that Sun Microsystems Inc’s Project Cascade is wrong for Sun, and wrong for Sun’s customers. With Sun about to begin selling AT&T Co’s Unix implementation of NT 4.0 file and print services on Solaris as Cascade, Syntax is staring at the loss of its most significant revenue stream. Sun currently resells Syntax’s TotalNet as SunLink, but is switching to Cascade. Why? Because Syntax wasn’t able to offer it an implementation of NT’s primary domain functions that enables Solaris to become, for all intents and purposes, an NT server. Sun wants to sell Sparc boxes into all-NT environments. But it didn’t know Syntax was working on implementing an NT primary domain controller (PDC) in a new cut of TotalNet Advanced Server that’s due out next week. Syntax admits that was naive on its part, but believes the Cascade decision was made by a marketing group at Sun which decided that tactically, Cascade would be the quickest way for it to sell Sparc boxes into all-NT environments. In other words it would have made no difference. Stung by Sun’s decision Syntax has resolved to get serious about marketing what appears to be an important cross-platform technology that enables users to seamlessly access data in mixed Unix, NT, NetWare, Mac and mainframe server environments. TotalNet translates between NFS and other network file system protocols, including NetBios/TCP, NetBeui, SPX/IPX and AppleTalk, enabling Unix to be viewed and accessed by all kinds of network clients and enables non-techies to perform administration tasks. It enables users to retain their security models from the these different environments but establishes a common file system. Network printing, login, diagnostics are offered on top through HTML- based administration and wizards, all of which can be interfaced to other applications, the company says. Roger Franklin, engineer and president of 14 year-old Syntax which had no salespeople until 1994, says the worst mistake the company made was to allow its OEMs, which include Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp, Silicon Graphics Inc as well as Sun, to market TotalNet under their own brand names.
Three-year effort
Although Microsoft publishes APIs for its CIFS common internet file systems which superseded the SMB system message block file system – that a slew of vendors have published – NT’s Active Directory network login and authentication services are kept private, in the same way that Sun, Novell and Transarc’s respective Solstice directory, NDS and DFS directory services are kept private. Like other vendors, Microsoft wants to retain control of data access. If data is on NT and it controls the access point through Active Directory, it ensures that customers will have to buy more NT (or Sun, Novell, Transarc etc) to get at the data, Syntax says. If all the vendors published all the specifications to their services, the majority of data integration and access problems that plague the industry would go away. Each may wrap up its services with the industry-standard LDAP lightweight directory access protocol but that just adds another layer of complexity, Syntax argues. A collection of vendors including IBM and Syntax have spent three years creating what’s effectively a clean room implementation of the NT primary domain functions Microsoft would rather keep secret by watching NT’s behavior and replicating its network activity. They will enable third party products to act as NT PDCs, support NT server logins and manage NT services and data. The functionality has been developed at a very low-level, and describes the formats of transactions, what bytes are sent and in what format. Sun was not involved and missed the boat, says Syntax. The AT&T Advanced server for Unix which Sun is reselling as Cascade and which a slew of other vendors have previously tried, and largely failed to make successful, is based on code drops provided by Microsoft itself. Moreover, industry reports suggest that AT&T unsuccessfully
sued Microsoft to get access to NT 5.0 (Windows 2000) code to develop new versions of ASU that will support future NT releases. Sun may be able to negotiate for the important pieces of NT 5.0 such as Active Directory from bona fide licensees such as Cisco Systems Inc, and said the Directory would feature in the next Solaris 8 release of its operating system 18 months or so out. It didn’t say where it would be getting this functionality from. Cascade, Syntax observes, stores NT data on Solaris as a separate data in a separate file system. It can be administered through a Window GUI but that must itself be configured from a Solaris management system. Moreover NT and Solaris processes can’t be shared under the Cascade model, defeating the purpose of server consolidation at which it is aimed. It also can only provide services to Windows and NT clients. ASU, Syntax says, is fragile and non-scalable. Microsoft controls the code base and it therefore cannot be changed. TotalNet 5.4 – we think it’s worth more than a dot release but hey, Syntax is new to this – includes Syntax’s primary domain controller eliminates the need for an NT primary domain controller by offering an NT logon server and NT access control lists. A TotalNet service can act as the PDC to NT workstations, another can ‘trust’ another Microsoft PDC for connecting to other Windows clients. Yet another service can use Sun’s NIS and NIS+ naming and directory services to authenticate and connect SMB/CIFS, DCE, NetWare or Mac clients. It also provides traditional PC network and print services to Solaris.
Common file format campaign
Resolving to get aggressive with its technology, Syntax is steeling itself to announce a campaign to win cross-industry support for its TotalNet common file system that can accommodate SMB/CIFS, NCP, AFP and NFS network protocols. It thinks that if it can get its OEMs to evangelize the stuff then others should get curious. It would love to get support from Redmond. It is also extending TotalNet to the mainframe world where Hitachi Ltd helped it co-develop a version of TotalNet which supports access to 10,000 PC ‘C’ drives concurrently. Hitachi has rights to market the code to customers and third party mainframers. The 100-person Syntax is privately-funded and claims to be profitable.
