It’s an unfortunate event to watch a once-stable environment slowly fall apart. We’ve been using Novell for as long as we’ve had file servers and only with the introduction of a formidable combination of events have we arrived at the decision to part ways with NDPS and NetWare for good. The combination of AutoDesk AutoCAD, Microsoft Exchange 2007, and Windows Vista rendered Novell incapable of providing the file server performance we have come to know and love.
To address how the introduction of newer version of AutoDesk software have driven us away from Novell, AutoDesk now explicitly states that AutoCAD is designed to work ONLY with Microsoft networks. Any other network-type is considered 3rd party and thus is not supported by AutoDesk. Judging from the list given by AutoDesk, this specific shift in support occurred exactly with the introduction AutoCAD 2009 products.
Exchange 2007, an absolutely enormous undertaking, allowed us to implement a new backup technology to relieve stress on our SAN and reduce the raw data size of most users’ inboxes. The introduction of iPhone 2.0 firmware also gave us an opportunity to explore viable alternatives to BlackBerry handhelds. To make matters more interesting (or complicated) we decided to pursue an advanced Exchange backup system to allow us to migrate old emails to another device and off our SAN. The archiving policy, a C2C Systems product, requires that users who wish to search their archived emails have a specific client installed. The client, as I’ll show in detail later, maps a share on the Exchange server. In order for the archival policy to work, the Exchange environment had to be 2007-native; in other words, no hybrid 2000/2007 environment would work.
With the demise of a certain in-house software package and the healthy circulation of a buzzword, or really an acronym, “BIM”, the need for a “more advanced” mechanical systems software was pushed through without any sort of IT involvement. This strategic shift (and subsequent purchase of $50,000+ in software) required Windows Vista and an enormous 16GB of RAM to function with any sort of usability. Fortunately for us, Novell had gotten around to writing that 64-bit client many, including myself, had complained about. The main problem? It causes share access performance to absolutely plummet. The client made life a living hell for any engineer routinely accessing files on a Novell share from Vista. After talks with Novell engineers, a fix wouldn’t be available until the next major release of the client, which could be as long as a year from now.
Having sacrificed many man-hours in the investigation of the Novell share performance, $100K+ in new software and hardware, and who knows how many bottles of headache medicine, I was given the word to set up a Microsoft file server (Windows 2003) to experiment with for CAD file storage. The results were phenomenal. As soon as the rest of the engineers got wind of the share, EVERYONE wanted access as soon as humanly possible. A massive migration occurred as a result and now upwards of 75 employees interact with the Microsoft share on a daily basis. We even managed to teach users how to take advantage of VSS to restore files — a relief after losing Novell’s salvage ability.
The timing couldn’t be worse for such a transition. We’ve had no time to research alternatives to throwing all of our eggs in the proverbial Microsoft basket and my apprehension grows every day. The most daunting task of this migration (the entire migration process will be a part of my blog) is restructuring, or at a minimum mirroring, the complex permissions in Novell NDS. I do believe that the easiest task will be setting up printing. NDPS has not been fun to maintain, especially relying on ConsoleOne and NWAdmin in lieu of iPrint, and even more cumbersome to configure for users (administrators are the only users who can see the NDPS tree and subsequently add printers to a workstation). Although I really wish we had time to investigate alternatives, I’m not really sure there are any worth pursuing. I don’t trust any Linux distribution without enterprise support and while Apple has served us well as Wiki software and as a Splunk server, their support for non-creative professionals is really non-existent (c’mon Steve, I know you have ONE MORE THING for us).
RIP Novell.
