For those corporates running Windows NT that need industrial strength enterprise servers, Sun Microsystems has an effective solution that is easy to install and free.
"Offering more reliable network services is an important differentiator in any IT department," comments Stefano Mattiello, managing director of Sun Microsystems SA. This is why Sun Microsystems Solaris PC Netlink is such a viable option, as it delivers Windows NT network services reliably on industrial-strength Solaris servers.
Sun makes it extremely easy to obtain PC Netlink as the software is free of charge and comes with unlimited client access. Installation is equally simple - there is no change to clients, no retraining system and a transparent integration into Windows NT server networks.
Solaris PC Netlink offers Windows NT services such as authentication and file-and-print, exactly as if they were running on a Windows NT server. In SA recently to address the Sun Technology Seminar, Jeffrey Hill, business analyst: competitive strategy group, chief technologist's office at Sun Microsystems Inc, explained that PC Netlink does not change any of the NT's services - it simply connects it to the right mechanism, ie the Solaris Operating Environment.
"When we developed Solaris PC Netlink we used exactly the same protocols as NT thus leveraging off the technology's strengths." Solaris PC Netlink is fully interoperable with Windows NT servers and supports all major operating system releases such as Window NT 4.0, Windows 95/98 and Windows 2000.
It is, however, important to note that Sun is not running the Windows NT environment itself on Solaris, just the network services. PC Netlink provides the following NT network services:
* A complete implementation of Windows NT 4.0 Server Directory (PDC/BDC - NTDS) on Solaris;
* Security and authentication (SAM/SID);
* NetBIOS and WINS;
* Network browser;
* File and print (NTFS); and Service Pack compliant
One key advantage of the Solaris PC Netlink platform is that it scales easily in terms of the number of services, applications, users, CPUs and platforms supported.
"The software has been tuned to handle large user workloads, supporting 2 000 concurrent connections on a single system and running on Sun's broad range of enterprise server platforms," says Hill.
Prominent companies using PC Netlink include Siemens and Oracle. The latest version of the software, PC Netlink 2.0 will be available later this year.
Share
Editorial contacts