Eight years after consulting electrical engineering company Rawlins Wales and Partners (RWP) first installed Novell`s NetWare 4.1, the company has reaffirmed its commitment to the Novell platform by recently upgrading to NetWare 6.
Established in 1987 by Andrew Rawlins and Cosmo Wales, RWP has offices in Gauteng, Durban and Cape Town. Each office is run as a separate partnership to ensure strong local control of projects, with technical support from the main practice in Gauteng.
RWP relied on Netware 4.1 primarily for file and print services and storage. "Although we found the system extremely stable, it was becoming difficult to add new devices, such as updated drives, and the product no longer supported our new backup system," relates RWP IT manager Fred Wallace. "Additionally, Novell had stopped delivering support for NetWare 4, which meant that any changes we wanted to make had to be done internally. Eventually, it became clear that we had to upgrade our system in order to retain our competitive-edge."
RWP investigated several solutions but finally decided on NetWare 6 owing to the product`s enhanced printing functionality and support for new technology.
"With about 10 Acad stations connected to the system, file storage and printing, and system stability were our most important requirements, especially given the nature of our business," says Wallace. "We plot files of around 5MB and larger in size on A0 plotters and always have about 20 to 30 files in the print queue. Consequently, we cannot afford to be without a printer, which must be able to handle large files quickly and reliably."
"NetWare 6 builds on the stability of NetWare and incorporates several versatile new technologies," says Novell`s Patricia Leaman. "It provides powerful, reliable processing for efficient file, print, directory, security and management services. NetWare integrates all major computing platforms, powers great applications, makes the most of Web technology, and significantly reduces the cost of network management and administration."
"RWP were also impressed with NetWare 6`s strong TCP/IP capabilities, which would significantly improve their system performance," says Dave Stewart, managing director of Novell Business Expert Easy Access and RWP`s implementation partner. "Their LAN had become extremely slow and cumbersome because of the tremendous load it was carrying, so we had to reduce the load on the network and improve its speed."
According to Stewart, RWP`s data was split across several drives within a single server, which necessitated various levels of mirroring. "This alone was difficult to manage on NetWare 4.1, so we consolidated the data onto bigger drives (standardising the drives at the same time), to give RWP more storage capacity with fewer drives to manage."
"Since installing NetWare 6, quicker file access and printing has meant that our productivity levels have improved dramatically," says Wallace. What used to take three minutes to spool is now completed in less than 30 seconds on the new system.
"Easy Access carried out a completely clean installation," he continues. "Their knowledge of NetWare 6 is excellent and their standard of service highly professional. I would recommend them for any similar installation."
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