The broad-ranging relationship, which delivers on a joint announcement made by the companies in October 1997, will use the intelligence of NDS as well as its user and resource data to manage Bay`s enterprise networking products, to improve quality of network service while reducing network ownership costs. Bay Networks will license NDS for bundling and integration with its Optivity Policy Services suite, to be delivered in the second quarter of 1999.
Novell and Nortel Networks will also work together to advance industry standards by collaborating within the Desktop Management Task Force (DMTF) to ensure that product offerings are based on such industry standards such as the Common Information Model (CIM) and its Directory Enabled Network (DEN) specification.
"The next major evolution in network management involves the administration of policies in multivendor networks," said Bay country manager Doug Batchelor. "Using the rich datastore and intelligence of NDS advances this management to an unprecedented level, allowing policies to be based on user and resource identity, totally independent of their location or other physical limitations. This capability is critical to our vision for changing the way the world shares ideas through Unified Networks that span data and telephony."
Novell`s directory technology, NDS, is the world`s leading directory service. It is the unifying, cross-platform infrastructure for managing, securing, accessing and developing to all the major components of a network. NDS supports more APIs, tools, standards and protocols than any other directory service. The advanced functionality in NDS offers a strong development foundation for delivering secure, manageable network applications. The market-proven and powerful structure of NDS streamlines administrative tasks to minimise management time and expense.
"The message is clear: NDS is finding a prominent place at the heart of the Internet," said Novell managing director Richard Beytagh. "The relationship with Nortel Networks further validates the power of Novell Directory Services to securely manage the opportunities of a networked world."
Bay`s Optivity product family provides the industry`s leading solution for management of network systems, network devices, and network traffic. The applications suite provides visibility to the changing nature of the physical network as well as the dynamic usage patterns and the applications transiting these networks.
Optivity links application service management and network-system management together, providing network administrators a completely integrated solution for delivering the quality of service that today`s business-critical networks and applications require.
Optivity is the leading enterprise network management application, with over 70 percent market share (IDC, 1997 Network Element Management report, May 1998), providing Novell with an efficient and broad-reaching mechanism for distributing NDS. This agreement is also evidence of Nortel`s commitment to policy-enabled networking as outlined in its August Optivity Policy Services announcement.
Policies can provide the ability to centrally provision, enforce and verify policies throughout a network, enabling the dynamic allocation of resources to users, groups and applications - based on the current state of the network and an administratively defined set of rules.
With the integration of NDS and Optivity Policy Services, network administrators will be able to allocate critical network resources based on corporate policy; and end users will see improved, high-quality network performance with consistent, prioritised access to key applications. This integration enables customers to define policies based on user identity, or other objects defined in NDS, and apply them regardless of the user`s location or IP address.
This integration between the physical network and directory-enabled software that controls access to all applications and resources on the network, will greatly reduce the costs associated with managing both. This NDS-enabled solution will enable network administrators to centrally maintain user, application and equipment information as well as the relationships among those components for both software and hardware management.
The new relationship between Novell and Nortel Networks will allow the companies to collaborate on new standards proposals related to the interoperability of physical networks and directories. Among such standards, the DEN specification is evolving to offer a standard approach to defining schema for integrating network equipment, such as routers and switches, with a directory service. Novell and Nortel`s joint support for IP, LDAP, DEN and RADIUS continually improves the customer`s ability to easily integrate heterogeneous private networks with the Internet.
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