The future of Netware, my opinion

We've heard from a number of sources that there will be a NetWare 7. I trust that this will be the case for a number of reasons, chief among them being that Open Enterprise Server 2.0 will need it. So we will have at least one more full-rev of the NetWare kernel. Yay!

Since we will have at least another rev in the 18-24 month timeframe, this opens the door for software vendors to decide to jump ship. I strongly suspect that the Veritas, ComputerAssociates, and Legato's of the world will support NetWare 7 thanks to a strong installed base. So this keeps us in a NetWare kernel for at least the next 2-5 years.

But NW7 is the make-or-break point of NetWare as a viable kernel. NetWare is hard to develop against, even with all the POSIX improvements they keep putting in. Once the backup vendors stop supporting NetWare as a backup-engine the writing will be on the wall.

If OES 2.0 manages to solve the interoperability problems between NW and Linux (and by that I mean differences of install, look and function of management tools, and the like), which needs doing anyway, it'll make it even harder for the software vendors to justify continuing development towards NetWare. One of the biggest reasons that someone would choose NW over the Linux kernel in a brand new OES install would be file-serving performance; should Novell manage to make Linux perform as well as NetWare in that regard, dooooooooom.

But I suspect that NetWare will remain in some form for a number of years. NetWare is a kernel that was designed from the bolts up to be a file-server, and that shows in the performance it cranks out. As an iSCSI back-end, it's an off-the-shelf OS that works great. So NetWare in this form may last as long as a v8.

But if the file-serving performance gap between hardware-identical NetWare and Linux servers ever closes to within a percentage point, the sheer market-share of Linux will drive companies to migrate fileserving to that half of the OES platform. We're not there yet, and we're still 3-5 years away from getting there.

Final Words:

NetWare as a kernel has at least 5 years of commercial viability ahead of it. At that point, market forces may very well force another round of NetWare -> Linux conversions. But we won't know until we get there.