Novell Certifies Highly Scalable IntranetWare Solutions
Articles and Tips: article
01 Oct 1997
Customers can Reduce Costs, Increase Efficiency Through Large-Scale Implementations of IntranetWare
Announcing the outcome of tests from its SuperLab and real-world customer environments, Novell recently showed how businesses can leverage the high scalability of IntranetWare servers and confidently can plan networks able to support more than 1,000 users on each server.
A new formal testing process for 1,000-plus user environments, introduced by Novell earlier this year, confirms that large enterprise customers can use Novell servers to dramatically lower the total cost of owning a network while enjoying maximum performance.
"IntranetWare's scalability allows us to get more for our money," said Kevin Workman, supervisor of engineering at San Diego-based Qualcomm, Inc., a large Novell customer. "To get more value out of our existing hardware investment, we grouped 3,000 users together on one server. Novell's IntranetWare has proven its ability to handle the load."
In Pittsburgh, Blue Cross has been running an IntranetWare server averaging between 2,400 and 2,700 active users for several months. "Our messaging application has been easier to administer by putting all the users together, and server reliability has been outstanding," said Ray Hricik, manager, LAN services at Blue Cross of Western Pennsylvania. "We have confidence that we could easily add additional users to our Compaq 5000 without any sacrifice in IntranetWare's performance. Without Novell Directory Services (NDS), we could never support this many users on one system."
"DeveloperNet Labs and Technical Support have worked closely with industry-leading hardware vendors to provide value to our common customers," said Richard Nortz, senior vice president of Novell Customer Services. "With a formal testing process for 1,000-plus user environments developed in the labs, Novell customers have confidence in knowing that IntranetWare product configurations have been proven reliable. We could have just announced that we could support massive scalability, but now we have real examples. That's a reality no one else can match."
To test IntranetWare as well as partner hardware solutions in 1,000-plus user environments, Novell hosted its OEM partners in a real world testing event known as ServerFest. Using the Novell SuperLab, hardware vendors were able to respond to real-world customer situations and measure the performance and reliability of their products.
More than 1,200 client workstations representing various manufacturers and models replicated activities of a typical business setting: E-mail, Web access, database, word processing, and file I/O. These tests provided quantitative results that correlate with customer experiences Novell had been evaluating during the months prior to the certification.
Other hardware vendors have also tested their configurations with the assistance of Novell Labs support staff. Hardware partners including IBM, Net-Frame, Hewlett Packard and Dell submitted products which passed rigorous ServerFest testing requirements. For specific Novell Labs certification bulletins, please visit http://labs.novell.com.
* Originally published in Novell AppNotes
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