| Hugh Bowen and I met with Novell in San Jose. We were told that the "hub
card spec" development had moved to Utah, where the driver development is
located. Novell's strategy is to drive the hardware price as low as it can
go, and they would sell the software to go with it. It seems they are trying
to get the industry margin on repeaters down to the adapter card level.
Novell has created the spec (HMI) that describes the repeater card's interface
to their management software. Novell will sell (direct or OEM) a piece of
software called HUBCON for $250, that runs on the PC where the hub cards
are installed. It allows you to do menu-driven repeater management and to
look at traffic and error statistics. The HMI spec describes a data structure
that implements much of the IEEE hub management spec.
The combination of the hub cards and the HUBCON software will likely be the
low end standard that the industry will follow. For all the thousands of
sites with fewer than 50 nodes, this will be what they will buy. The user
can start off with 12 ports and expand in groups of 12. LENAC is looking
into having a product in this space.
Novell is also developing Netware Management Services, or NMS, for short.
It costs $4995. It can manage SNMP over IPX. For an additional $1995, you
get the first "enhancement" package, which gives you SNMP over IP and a
better network map capability. There are 2 versions - OS/2 and Windows.
The development of one is independent from the other, so releases will be
asynchronous. You'll see common functionality on the two, and other features
that exist on one, but not the other. Besides network management, you get
Netware management.
At $6990, the product isn't competitive with other PC-based SNMP network
management products. I think users will buy it because it allows them to
combine Netware and network management on one system.
The NMS product isn't shipping yet; they will roll it out in pieces,
with the first piece coming out in April. They will produce a development
kit for third party developers, which will also start rollout in April. But
SNMP over IP won't be in the first release. LENAC will continue to track
the development.
Note that you don't have to install any of this on the Netware Server. Any
PC with enough horsepower to run Windows is OK for the NMS, and a 286 is
fine for the hub cards and HUBCON.
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