In what amounts to a "first" for southern Africa, Paarl Municipality has taken control of a heterogeneous network, including NetWare, Solaris and Windows NT servers, with Novell Network Directory Services (NDS).
Assisted by certified Novell Business Expert, Unihold Business Solutions, the municipality opted for NDS over other products primarily as a result of its own large pool of expertise on the Novell platform. Frans Theron, IT Manager at Paarl Municipality, says the move was a result of consolidation and restructure at the municipality.
"In order to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) of our computing infrastructure, we needed to consolidate all our systems and eliminate duplication of effort," he says.
While several solutions to this dilemma exist today, Paarl elected to go the Novell NDS route primarily because of a large existing investment in Novell technology.
Says Marcel Rose, network manager at Paarl Municipality: "Simplistically, we needed to merge several Windows NT servers and a Sun system (running Solaris) with an existing large Novell network, and ensure central management and control of the resulting heterogeneous network."
Since Rose himself is a holder of Master CNE and GroupWise certifications, and the rest of Paarl Municipality`s IT workforce is predominately Novell-skilled, this could have resulted in a need to acquire Solaris and Windows NT skills. However, another alternative beckoned.
"Having followed the development of NDS out of interest, we could accomplish our goals by sticking to Novell as the base network operating system - thereby making use of the expertise we have in this area - and deploy NDS to manage the disparate systems running Windows NT and Solaris," he says.
"As it stands, and because of NDS, we are now able to manage all our network`s resources in a single, familiar Novell interface." Financially the decision made sense too, particularly in view of the notoriously tight budgets in local government. Theron says that selecting NDS eliminated the need for skills (that would probably have been under-utilised. "In essence, and by selecting NDS, we have reduced the TCO of our computer network which will, at the end of the day, save rate-payers money."
Wayne Crocker, strategic account executive at Unihold, concurs. "Many of the organisations that have deployed NDS have cited potential TCO savings as a key reason for doing so. The fact that Paarl has accomplished something no one else in South Africa has accomplished as yet - using NDS to manage Solaris - raises NDS` profile as a viable alternative," he says.
Theron describes the benefit most succinctly: "Using NDS to manage Solaris gives us all the advanced functionality, security and robustness of Unix without having to invest in the skills to support it directly."
On the subject of TCO, Paarl has also signed a Corporate License Agreement (CLA) for all its Novell licensing with Unihold. Crocker: "The contract is for a period of two years and, by virtue of the commitment to Novell that it represents, it will reduce the cost of procurement for licenses and make Unihold the sole supplier of Novell products to the municipality.
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