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It's interesting to note what some companies are doing to straddle the fence with NT and Unix. HP, for example, offers a Unix product as well as an NT product for application hosting. This is a harbinger of the future, where NT, in many instances, will be deployed in conjunction with Unix systems as a single solution. This route offers customers the benefits of both platforms.

On the enterprise computing landscape, Unix still dominates the world of application hosting. NT and, to a lesser degree, NetWare provide competent platforms for running applications, but Unix remains the platform of choice for enterprise-scale applications. Unix products have a longer tradition of running these specialized applications, and have been tuned to meet the needs of the enterprise. Only with NT 4.0 did Microsoft enter the equation, and NetWare still is not a contender.

Among the reasons Unix is so suitable for enterprise applications is the fact that 64-bit versions of Unix are already on the market. HP-UX 11.0 is a 64-bit operating system (though not the first available) that can scale far beyond the current versions of NT and NetWare. Why is this significant? Because with data stores today easily reaching more than 3 GB and some even a terabyte, many enterprise-class applications need more than 3 GB of addressable memory to store data.

Another area where Unix shines is availability. Sun and HP each have clusters that offer both scalability and availability . The top performer in the latest TPC (Transaction Processing Council) TPC-C benchmark is a Sun cluster system with 32 processors, which achieved better than 51,000 tpmC (transactions per minute). But as expected, it costs a bundle. HP offers a 16-node cluster, whereas NT supports two-node failover only (see "High-Availability Options," on page 54). Both NT and NetWare have road maps that outline future scalability products, but these products are not yet shipping.

And then there's the question of performance. While NT can rightfully claim a superior cost/performance advantage, if you need horsepower, Unix is the only way to go.

Lab-Tested NOSes To get a handle on the developing battle of the NOSes, and to glean insights on the effect these products could have on your enterprise network, we brought Microsoft NT Server 5.0 Beta 1 and Novell's NetWare 5 Beta 1 into our distributed labs. For good measure, we sprinkled in some testing of SunSoft's Solaris 2.6 with Intranet Server Extensions 1.0 and an analysis of HP's latest Unix offering, HP-UX 11.0. This is not a complete list of all available NOSes, but we feel it's a solid short list.

To fully understand a product as complex as a NOS, its testing should not be restricted to a single network: These products are not used in isolated networks. Therefore, we installed NT 5 and NetWare 5 in multiple locations. Our NT 5 test network was installed in our San Mateo, Calif., lab and our Syracuse University lab. In San Mateo, we installed our primary DNS server and two domains. Our Syracuse lab had its own domain, which we replicated to a server in our San Mateo domain. This let us not only evaluate the trust relationships between domains working over a WAN but also gauge the effectiveness of a replicated domain over the WAN. Our test NetWare 5 network setup was similar. With the root of the NDS tree located in San Mateo and a second server at the University of Wisconsin, we were able to fully test the new IP-based NDS tree. On the Wisconsin server, we pl aced a partition of our NDS tree. Our test machines for both NT and NetWare were from Compaq Computer Corp., Dell Computer Corp. and Micron Electronics.

The Solaris testing was also performed in San Mateo and reflects earlier evaluations completed for our Sneak Preview of the product (see "Sun Breaks Through Stormy Network Clouds," www.NetworkComputing.com/821/821sp22.html). HP was unable to get us product in time for our testing, so the highlights of that product presented here are not based on actual lab testing.

Overall, we were impressed by the quality of both NT 5.0 and NetWare 5, despite their beta status. Their adoption of standard protocols will ease the burden on network administrators, but there is still a long road ahead before either product is ready for mission-critical applications. Unix will continue to dominate mission-critical and high-capacity applications with its outstanding performance and time-tested reliability.