Japan's NOS Wars:
The NT vs. NetWare Showdown
by Steven Myers The choice of network server and client software is one of the first and most fundamentally important decisions that an organization must make in planning and preparing for the installation of a client-server LAN (local area network). Novell's NetWare remains by far the worldwide NOS (network operating system) leader, but Microsoft's Windows NT Server 3.5 has, over the past several months, proven itself solid and robust enough to go head-to-head with NetWare. Many industry analysts believe that NT poses a serious threat to Novell's long-held dominance of the NOS market, especially in Japan.
Examining NetWare and NT from the perspective of a multinational organization that uses both English and Japanese client environments makes for several interesting comparisons between the two systems. In addition to an evaluation of the basic features and strengths of each, network administrators must take into account various "bilingual LAN" considerations -- such as the handling of kana and kanji file names, and Japanese printing capabilities. Perhaps just as important for the organization is the overall presence and reliability of the two companies in Japan, especially in terms of technical support.
Basic NOS features
Microsoft's push to secure a piece of the Japanese NOS market began in earnest with the release of NT 3.5J in December 1994. At that time, Novell Japan controlled an estimated 36% of the nationwide market -- considerably lower than its 66% worldwide share. The main features of 3.5 promoted by Microsoft include NT's strong capabilities as a business application server and its ease of installation and management.Novell countered with the release of NetWare 4.1J in June 1995, putting heavy emphasis on the new NetWare Directory Service (NDS) and improved security features. NDS has garnered significant positive reviews for Novell. This global directory service is a tree-like hierarchical structure that considerably simplifies management for large networks in which multiple servers are used. In the NDS, network resources (such as users, volumes on a file server, shared printers, print queues) are represented as objects, which are similar to records in a database. These objects can be container objects (used for organizational purposes, like subdirectories in DOS) or leaf objects (representing a resource, similar to a file under DOS).
With prior versions of NetWare, for example, a system administrator dealing with 14 file servers, in order to grant a user access to a volume on all 14 servers, would have to go through the following steps for each file server:
1. Log in to the file server.
2. Use an administration program, such as SYSCON, to create the user.
3. Give the user the necessary rights to the desired directory on the volume.
These three steps would be repeated on each of the 14 file servers, for a total of 42 separate tasks.
Using NDS on NetWare 4.1, however, the sequence is:
1. Log in to the NDS tree.
2. Create the user for each server in the NDS tree.
3. Give the user rights to the desired volumes on all servers.
Here, only step 2 must be performed for each server, for a total of just 16 tasks -- a significant improvement that becomes more noticeable as the network grows in size.
Microsoft, for its part, claims that Novell's NDS is overhyped. NT's own directory service, while not hierarchical like NDS, still has several unique advantages, notes Microsoft. This view is seconded in a June 19 Communications Week article that conducted a thorough comparison of the two structures. The reviewers found that while NDS does offer definite advantages for managers of large networks who must make frequent changes, those advantages are "not nearly as large a margin (over NT's directory structure) as Novell claims."
The reviewers went on to describe the results of extensive comparison tests between NT Server and NetWare 4.1. Their conclusion was that, while the scoring was close, in the end Microsoft had earned a "clear win." Among other things, they found security features adequate on both environments, and while NetWare managed to take the top score on a series of performance tests, installation and configuration were much easier with NT.
A comprehensive comparison of NT and NetWare features is beyond the scope of this article, but the general consensus among the network administrators and systems integrators in Japan that we spoke with supports the view that NT Server is easier to install and maintain, although Novell's NDS provides some maintenance advantages for administrators of large networks. Significantly, though, several network professionals voiced criticism of the support provided by Novell Japan; the general opinion is that patches, drivers, bug fixes, and utility software for NT are much easier to come by than those for NetWare.
Bilingual LAN considerations
Multinational organizations that need to have both English and Japanese client environments accessing the same server (a bilingual LAN) have long struggled with a special set of problems related to file sharing, printing, back up, and server reliability. The sidebar on page 35 illustrates one of the fundamental problems with sharing files that have double-byte character set (DBCS) file names.At a bilingual network level, with more users and more file sharing, this problem is compounded. Recent versions of NetWare and NT have helped ease these problems, but there remains a fair amount of disagreement over the best way to set up and configure such a LAN. Nevertheless, a few basic guidelines find agreement among bilingual LAN integrators.
Regardless of whether NT Server or NetWare is being used, the first question in setting up a bilingual LAN is which language version (Japanese or English) of the server software to use. Without exception, all of the network integrators we spoke with recommended using the English version of the NOS; reasons given were that it tends to be more stable and better supported. The general opinion was that a Japanese server should only be used in cases where the entire client environment is Japanese.
Not surprisingly, NetWare 3.x gets lowest marks for bilingual connectivity. Because the server uses DOS naming conventions, double-byte file names are not supported. Certain NLMs (NetWare Loadable Modules) can cause the server to crash if DBCS file names are present. Also, older versions of the workstation shell often result in corrupt printing from Japanese DOS applications.
NetWare 4.x, while based on Unicode, also is not capable of true DBCS support. In addition, use of MS-DOS/V without the Japanese drivers loaded will result in the user being unable to log in. The basic reason is that, in the absence of Japanese drivers, the DOS code page (for character codes) is set to 001 (for English), which cannot be used in combination with the Japan country code (081) under NetWare. With NetWare 4.1, a Japanese country code requires a Japanese code page, which means the user must manually change the code page to 932 (for Japanese) using the CHCP command before being able to log in.
NT Server, also Unicode-based, lacks the code to perform Shift-JIS to Unicode conversion. This limitation poses a problem on LANs using Windows/DOS clients, since the DOS workstations send their requests in ASCII or Shift-JIS form. The Unicode coding scheme, which uses a double-byte sequence for all characters and supports multiple languages, has shown promise for freeing networks from language dependencies -- but this is only possible if all components of the network are Unicode capable.
At present, the only way to maintain a fully bilingual Unicode- and DBCS-capable network of PCs is to use NT Server with Japanese and English NT Workstation clients. Furthermore, it appears that this situation may not change for some time, since Windows 95 will not include Unicode support.
In comparing the file and print services of NT Server and NetWare in a Japanese environment, one point that network integrators generally agree on is that both the NT 3.5 and NT 3.5J file and print services are for the most part slower than those of NetWare (although performance can be improved by adding RAM and/or a faster CPU). If Windows clients are used, NT print services are reported to be much more reliable than NetWare's in a Japanese printing environment with HP (Hewlett Packard) printers.
The future of NT
and NetWare in Japan
By nearly all accounts, NT Server 3.5 has already managed to build a commanding
presence in the Japanese NOS market, and it is continuing to gain momentum.
When asked about the ease of installation of NT vs. NetWare, a frequent
response of network integrators in the Tokyo area was, "I can't even
remember the last time I did a NetWare installation. It's been all NT lately."
As if to pound the final nail in the coffin, Kazuhiko Nishi, president of
computer magazine publishing giant ASCII, proclaimed in a recent Nikkei
Computer interview: "NetWare is finished, it's time has passed."
The results of a survey conducted by Nikkei Data Pro in February and March found that approximately 70% of Japan's large corporations are likely to install NT in the near future. Of the 503 companies surveyed, 15% have already decided to install the NOS. As further corroboration of the trend, the NT user's forum on Nifty-Serve has seen an explosive increase in the number of new members in 1995, topping 40,000 total in July, as opposed to just 17,000 for the Novell user's forum.
Without question, a number of factors peculiar to the Japanese market are working to Microsoft's advantage. As noted earlier, Novell has never managed to achieve the same kind of dominance in Japan that it has in other countries. Also, with the shift toward client-server networks just taking off in Japan, the timing of NT's arrival could not have been better. A large percentage of NetWare users in Japan are looking to upgrade from 3.x, and Microsoft has set up a special migration program targeted specifically at these users, to move them to NT Server rather than NetWare 4.1. Says Matthew Connolly of the Banque Indosuez IS Department, "We had been using NetWare 3.11, but went straight to NT 3.5 when it came out. We never even considered a NetWare 4.x upgrade."
Still, not everyone is accepting all the Microsoft hype at face value, at least among Japanese corporations. In July, the Japan Electronics Industries Development Association (JEIDA) announced the results of its own survey, which predicts that NetWare will still control 38% of the NOS market in 1997 to NT Server's 19%. JEIDA predicts that NetWare will, by that time, have an installed base of 176,000 in Japan. Also, in a recent Nikkei Byte article (April 1995), several Japanese distributors and resellers, including World Business Computer and Otsuka Shokai, made statements to the effect that, while a lot of companies are talking about NT, sales of NetWare remain as strong as ever, and when it actually comes down to installing a new system, the majority go with NetWare.
How will the release of Windows 95 in Japan affect the NT/NetWare battle? Microsoft is still (as of late July) holding to its promise of a late-October release date for Windows 95J. Japanese Windows 95 beta testers using the OS in an NT network report that it is an excellent client for NT server. Greg Smith of Fast River Systems suggests that the Japanese response to Windows 95 is likely to be even more overwhelming than that of the Western markets.
There is an uncommonly large number of new PC users in Japan who are eager to get their feet wet, and Windows 95 provides a user interface that is tailor-made for beginners. Add to that equation long-time corporate Japanese Windows users, who have had to make do for years now with 3.1J, since a Japanese version of Windows For Workgroups was never developed; these users are more than ready for the next step up. If the integration between NT Server and the Windows 95 client environment is as tight as initial reports indicate, then in spite of surveys to the contrary, NT Server could very well lead the Japanese NOS market in the not-so-distant future.ç
The author would like to thank the following people for their
contributions to this article:
Matthew Connolly
(IS Dept., Banque Indosuez)
Farhad Farshad, Ajay Kotkar, and Gary Nyberg
(LINC Computer)
Marc Simmons
(SimNet)
Greg Smith
(Fast River Systems)
