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April 3, 2003
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"I cut my networking teeth on NetWare and have always been an advocate of Novell--until now." ~ Garland Wayne Garris
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ROI Rebound
"Lessons From the Field: Beyond ROI" (March 5, 2003) was both on point and stimulating. I enjoyed its candor and language. I am inundated with the constant struggle of justifying any purchase to the nth degree. After reading your article, I realize that I have been guilty of overusing the ROI model to justify everything. As you stated, I often wondered how I was going to justify those intangible things that newer technology brings to the table without the "15 minutes saved" argument.
Ken Stewart
Information Technology Manager
Company name withheld by request
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Weaning Off Novell
"Novell Ships NetWare 6.5 Beta, Now Featuring Kitchen Sink" (March 5, 2003) was a good article. I cut my networking teeth on NetWare and have always been an advocate of Novell--until now. I'm moving away from its technologies because of the company's initial response to TCP/IP and encapsulation, lack of support for NAT and its OS pricing model.
The cost of NetWare server and client licenses and ZENWorks licenses is about equal to what you'd spend for Windows NT. I am not a Microsoft fan, but I must implement the simplest, most dependable and most affordable solution.
Garland Wayne Garris
Owner; Garris Information Systems
wgarris@garrisinfosys.com
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Why Switch?
Thanks for the article on unified messaging ("Come and Get It!," Feb. 20, 2003). I wonder how other technology managers feel about moving voice technology to LAN servers--with the accompanying problems of network security and flaky OS software, not to mention that Microsoft Exchange probably isn't the best place to store large voice and fax data files.
Also, the ROI assumptions quoted so far don't make sense to me. For one thing, pulling an analog telephone cable to each desk is very cheap; the cost differential is essentially the cost of the cable--the labor is already invested in pulling data cable. Furthermore, it is easier to learn how to do MAC (Media Access Control) addresses on your TDM telephone system than to become a VoIP expert. Just how much knowledge is required on site to manage a VoIP system?
I'm also curious about the "additional 25 to 40 minutes a day" figure quoted in the article. This sounds like taking phone calls during lunch or driving while talking on your cell phone--a recipe for indigestion or car accidents.
Richard Snow
Proprietor; BNC Consulting
rich@bnc-consulting.com
Sean Doherty replies: Many managers probably don't feel good about moving voice onto their data networks, but there are no simple answers to their reluctance to converge. And there isn't a generic formula for convergence that can be applied to every enterprise. For instance, I would agree that pulling telephone-grade cable doesn't add much more effort to the task of pulling data cable to the desktop. But I would also consider the effort in the wiring closet and the additional complexity of moving or adding a telephone compared to VoIP.
The "25 to 40 minutes" was cited from a Radicati Group study done on implementing Lucent Technologies' Octel Unified Messenger for Microsoft Exchange in 1998 (see radicati. com/single_report/) That's right, 1998. It doesn't seem that long ago to me, but I realize it may seem like a lifetime to many of our readers. I actually saved much more than 25 to 40 minutes handling my voicemail with my e-mail. With unified messaging, you can easily deflect real-time calls while you are driving or having lunch.
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Active Problems
In the article "Sharing the Load" (Feb. 20, 2003), Lori MacVittie discusses active-active and active-standby failover, but does not mention active-active's 50 percent rule. A risk of active-active is that since the two load balancers are both active and sharing load, you can end up with a total load transversing your load-balancing environment that can't be sustained by a single load balancer. Should one unit in an active-active pair fail, your total load-balancing load could exceed the carrying capacity of a single unit. So much for redundancy. Active-active configurations require monitoring for total load. Additionally, some networking hardware does not have a linear response to load, and the threshold for over-capacity of an active-active pair is often much lower than 50 percent.
Matthew Leeds
VP Operations; Gracenote (CDDB)
mleeds@gracenote.com
Lori MacVittie replies:
Active-active configurations also tend to be less efficient because of the bidirectional mirroring of session information. I prefer an active-standby configuration because it avoids both of these problems.
Ignoring XML
Lori MacVittie's article on XML translation and the Data Power XA35 was great ("XML Translations With a Kick," Oct. 21, 2002). I have a question, though: When the XA35 is deployed in proxy mode, how is XML processing turned off on the Web/application server? If I have an application deployed in Apache/Tomcat, which transforms XML to HTML before sending it to the client, how can I turn that off without changing the application?
Sridhar Guthula
Principal Software Engineer; Credolink Systems
guthula@yahoo.com
Lori MacVittie replies:
The XML processing is not turned off; it's just not used because the transformation occurs before the traffic reaches Tomcat.
Tell us how you really feel. Write to us at editor@nwc.com. Include your name, title, company name, e-mail address and phone number. All correspondence becomes the property of Network Computing.
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