The AT&T Connection

Waiting in the wings is a development that could radically transform the significance of NetWare 4 and NDS (NetWare Directory Services). AT&T's forthcoming NetWare Connect Services marries these Novell technologies with its own InterSpan frame-relay network, and, eventually, ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) technology to create what will be, in effect, a business Internet. It's expected to debut in the fourth quarter of the year and will host, among other services, AT&T Network Notes, a smaller project based on Lotus Notes that is already in market trial. For NetWare Connect Services, AT&T will maintain the root of an NDS tree. Subscribers that attach their NetWare 4 LANs to the tree will enjoy intercompany and intracompany WANs through AT &T's public data network. To complement the InterSpan hookups, dial-up access will be available in 200 cities in the form of a 950 number that branch offices and individuals can use.

If this plan works well and is affordable, it will be a godsend for the many businesses that run LANs in multiple locations and are struggling with the endless hassles of private, do-it-yourself WANs. Because the NDS root will be public, subscribing businesses will eventually be able to browse and search networkwide for other businesses' users, services, and published information. However, although AT&T will own and operate the root, it won't be able to snoop. In NDS, organizations are self-governing worlds not beholden to the galactic empire.

It's hard to exaggerate the potential importance of such a business Internet. The TCP/IP Internet now being pressed into the service of business-to-business networking is a horse of an entirely different color. True, companies are eagerly creating their own WWW (World Wide Web) home pages and deploying Mosaic as a business application. However, the Internet lacks a coherent directory, and the so-called Internet discovery tools (e.g., netfind, archie, and WebCrawler), are, while ingenious, a poor substitute for a real directory. Companies that engage in network-based commerce will expect to be able to find each other on the network in the same way that they now find each other in the phone book. They'll expect to be able to contact each other whenever they want, not just when an intervening name server happens to cooperate. And they'll want to be able to bill for services rendered through the network. Clearly AT&T's infrastructure is tuned to satisfy just these kinds of expectations.

Can NetWare 4 and NDS meet the challenge? ``We don't think there are inherent scalability limits,'' says John Friedmann, senior product manager for AT&T NetWare Connect Services, ``but certainly there's no one who's done anything this big yet.'' The best large-scale test of NetWare 4 has been Nove ll's own. According to Jim Greene, product line manager for NetWare server products, the company saw early on that ``we couldn't test NetWare 4 in the superlab, that's not real life.'' So Novell began using it on a production basis when the software was still in prebeta form. ``Not all the IS guys will agree,'' says Greene, ``but I think it was the best decision we ever made.'' Many of the 4.1 enhancements reflect Novell's own experience as a large-scale user.