WhyNovellForFilePrint

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Why Novell for file and print?


Please contribute ideas/logic to this wiki. This will take an organization, we'll call XORG and review some of the reasons to stay with Novell for file/print.

A decision making process should be objective and consider all major factors. Which will include technical and non-technical factors.

Summary
Continue to use NW for file and print until Linux solutions are more mature. 2010 start migrating from NW to Linux. Use the money one would spend on going from one file/print solution to another (in the end you get about the same thing), and spend that money on Identity Management and business process improvements.

Sure, use AD to manage Windows servers. If you want to use AD to "transparent authenticate" to bluecoat that is fine. Use IDM to sync edir creds to AD.

Contents

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non-technical factors

Staying with Novell for file/print will benefit XORG by:

  1. Increased negotiations with MS, if you have Novell in your environment you can better negotiate by
    1. Having choice
      1. MS is known for their aggressive business tactics
    2. Getting a better price
    3. Leverage
  2. Local Support by Senior Support Engineer
    1. Someone who understand technical and non-technical environment
    2. Long term support relationship
  3. Influence on product feature and company direction - XORG would be a small fish to MS, but has great influence on Novell
  4. Novell is solvent/financially healthy
  5. Open source will over innovate closed source MS. Will MS be valid in 40 years? Look what they spent on Vista, an OS no body wants/needs.
  6. Cost
    1. Total cost of ownership for complete feature set is about 1/4 the cost with Novell. Beware of hidden MS costs, like 3rd party products to be able to manage MS in larger-than-workgroup sized organizations.
    2. Increased labor/maint. costs with weekly MS patches, verses yearly Novell patches
    3. MS down time costs
    4. Security costs
      1. Liability
      2. Loss of information
      3. Malware


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technical reasons for staying with Novell for file and print

  1. Novell Client provides high automation of environment variables. Like setting variables for applications (How would this be replaced in AD)?
  2. Novell client provides ZENworks scalable clients. To my knowledge, non-novell client ZENworks solutions are not fully scalable...yet
  3. High Availability for file system
  4. Less labor spent on patching/maintaining.
  5. expensive to identify all login scripts, variable -- location based on network address scripts
  6. A migration, to do it right, will require a complete re-design - identify resources, who has access to them - vs just a migration tool


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XORG's expressed concerns

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Novell Client Stability issues

  1. Support engineer and customer staff is unaware of Novell Client issues in the past 2 years
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NCP is chatty and takes up a lot of the WAN

  1. If configured properly this should NOT occur. Fall 2006 PSE requested WAN traces to confirm if this was happening.
  2. Possible misconfiguration that may cause unwanted WAN traffic
    1. ZEN/NAL launcher config mis-configuration
    2. old eDir code defective in re-sync attributes - fixed in 8.7.3.9
    3. Replica placement misconfigured
    4. Re-review NRS partition placement if all of the above are resolved and still too high of WAN traffic
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eDirectory doesn't integrate with 3rd party apps

    1. XORG was not able to give more than ONE example of a specific app.
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XORG management heard that common configuration is to have limited information in the directory

  1. This is true with a limited directory product like Active Directory
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interruptions/outages

  1. Please quantify this. How many hours of down time in 2006,2007 and 2008?
  2. Approx 80% of impact of the last 12 months could have been avoided with proper configuration/ patch maint.
    1. Recent outages
      1. eDir slow pw sync - cause misconfigured IDM that sync'd groups (not used), ACL/Security rights (not used) and many other attributes that caused IDM to become overwhelmed
      2. Slow edir sync - cause: DR simulation caused a threshold to be exceeded, that caused edir to resync the same object over and over again. Fixed was in 8.7.3.9 - This patch has been out since Aug 2007.
      3. Cluster resources not migrating successfully - Cause: known issue with galaxy
      4. NSS volume corruption abended a node, then migrated to the next and the next. Cause: unknown. Prevention: Do nss rebuilds once a year on each volume.
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