Like every other networking technology, the NOS is diverging. File and print services are still essential, but what strategic decisions have you made lately that have much to do with those core services? Rather, the big news in all these operating systems is their Internet/intranet/ e-commerce services. The vendor that can best meet these needs is the one that will likely be seeing the money from your company.

The ISOS (Internet/intranet services operating system) is the wave of the present, and each vendor in this evaluation--Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat and Sun--recognizes the importance of delivering features that let your company provide Internet-based services, beyond the core file and print services. We're here to help you navigate through the issues, to highlight some critical components and, ultimately, to help you find a good fit for your company. Because one size doesn't fit all, we didn't select an Editor's Choice award winner. One company's dream NOS is likely to be another's nightmare because of different goals, technical expertise and existing infrastructure.

We've identified five categories to help guide the discussion: core services, management services, scalability, enterprise fit and Internet-specific services. Reliability isn't on the list, though it may be the most important consideration. Reliability is more like a personality trait than a feature. Just as you need to see people in a number of different circumstances--relaxed, in unfamiliar surroundings, under stress, sleep-deprived and so on--to get a realistic picture of their personalities, these ISOSes must be seen in a number of real-world scenarios. Time will tell the reliability story, but keep in mind that the best feature set in the world is useless if the ISOS isn't reliable.

Core services consist of file, print, security, authentication and directory services. This category provides a lot to swallow in one bite, but these items represent the basic services necessary to enable an ISOS in the enterprise. Including directory services in this list may raise some eyebrows, but we are convinced that directories are critical and that vendors need to articulate strategies that map their services into a company's directory service.

Novell's NetWare 5.1 dominates the core-services space, and Novell's vision and product maturity are compelling. Marketplace predictions continue to point to Windows 2000 as the next dominant player, but Microsoft's single-platform concentration needs to be expanded to attract serious enterprise attention. We aren't too excited about the core-services offerings from Red Hat Linux Professional 6.2 or Solaris 8. Operating systems that default to clear-text passwords on the wire for authentication have a long way to go to meet the bare minimum requirement for core services.

Management services involve the ability to manage an individual box, hundreds of individual boxes and, because we're dealing with hundreds and thousands of clients' machines connecting to the company's intranet, the distributed environment as well. Once again, NetWare 5.1 and Windows 2000 have the upper hand by providing management services that take the enterprise desktop into consideration. Not only do they offer easy-to-use management utilities for their boxes, but they provide directory-enabled management tools for the masses. Windows 2000 will take care of its own, but NetWare is an equal-opportunity manager, covering Windows 9x, NT and 2000.

You can look at scalability a few different ways. Vertical scalability lets you pack processors, memory and storage space into a single box until it's got power to burn. Vertical scalability and Solaris go hand in hand; Sun Microsystems sells the Enterprise 10000 Server with up to 64 SPARC processors. Horizontal scalability lets you take a number of boxes and team them up so the sum is greater than the individual parts. Windows 2000 Advanced Server lets you load-balance IP-based applications across 32 nodes. Advanced Server also supports eight-way SMP (symmetric multiprocessing). Then there's the scalability that results from parsimonious use of hardware resources, which lets you get more bang from your buck. Linux falls into that camp. NetWare was once the king of frugality, but our testing revealed that feature creep is starting to show where memory requirements are concerned.

We define enterprise fit in part as the ability for any vendor's ISOS to work with and add value to the heterogeneous environment in which the system will be running. NDS is Novell's value proposition for the enterprise, and its cross-platform support is second to none. NDS is a good example of how to leverage proprietary technology in the enterprise by fitting it into and adding value to what's already there. Support for open standards and open-source code are also good indicators of how well an ISOS will fit into your environment, especially if you have an active staff of developers. Linux is the master of open-source computing, and Sun has seen the light (see "Small Steps for Sun"). Novell's strategy to provide a standards-based development environment around Java and its inclusion of IBM's WebSphere application server in the box are noteworthy. Windows 2000 is the most challenged in terms of enterprise fit. Microsoft supports open standards, but some twist invariably makes it difficult for Microsoft's products to play well with others.

All the vendors include DNS, DHCP and Web-server services in the box. Red Hat Linux includes IMAP, POP3 and sendmail for a complete Internet-based mail infrastructure. In fact, it's a good bet you could browse the Web and find source code to compile any desired Internet service for Linux or Solaris. Versions of Unix, like Solaris, have been running the Internet since its inception; Linux grew out of that fertile ground and has been Internet savvy since its start. NetWare and Windows 2000 are the newcomers to the Internet arena. They have added value to this space by directory-enabling traditional Internet services such as DNS and DHCP, but this infrastructure space will continue to be difficult for these companies to crack because Unix is so well ingrained. Microsoft has been particularly influential in the Web services arena by providing numerous programmatic interfaces for the legion of Windows developers. Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) is in its fifth iteration and continues to gain industry support, though Apache Web servers still dominate numerically. The Holy Grail for all these firms is gaining a commanding piece of the trillion dollar-plus pie that e-commerce will represent in a year or two.

We performed file and Web services benchmarks on NetWare, Red Hat Linux and Windows 2000 Advanced Server (see "How We Tested."). Sun opted out of the benchmarking for Solaris because we were using 600-MHz Pentiums on the Intel side, and the fastest SPARC processor runs at 450 MHz.

So what is the ideal NOS? Sun Solaris beats the rest in Internet services, Novell NetWare still rules the traditional NOS arena, and Microsoft Windows 2000 and Red Hat Linux make a strong showing in both sets of services. But as for picking the best one, you know the answer as well as we do. It's 42.