Linda Musthaler/Speaking the LANguage
Comdex network is not just for show
Imagine having to set up a single network to support about a quarter million users - and having less than a week to do it. Impossible, even laughable, you say? Well, stop laughing and read on, because a few engineers from Novell, Compaq and Bay Networks just accomplished that feat.
Spearheaded by Novell, engineers from the three companies constructed perhaps the largest-ever live single-directory network for this week's Comdex/Fall '97 show. Known as ``The Comdex IntraNet: Novell Connecting Points," the network will provide messaging, Internet access and collaboration services to every registered attendee at Comdex - a record 250,000 people. It is designed to handle about a million messages a day and five million messages during the span of the show.
According to Bill Sell, group show director with Softbank/Comdex, Connecting Points is more than just an e-mail service. It's a complete intranet for the whole conference and show event, providing conference listings, news analysis, event updates and detailed information complementing the Comdex Show Daily publication.
Large enterprises should sit up and take notice of what Novell and its partners are doing here. They are using off-the-shelf, industry-standard products to solve many of the same communications challenges big companies face, within a very compressed time line, no less.
It took about two months to design and test the system in the labs, in addition to four days for setup. According to Dan Welch, manager of the Connecting Points engineering team, the biggest challenge was not making the products scale to the necessary size, but setting up the system in such a short time frame.
Connecting Points uses a variety of Novell products: GroupWise collaboration software, Novell Directory Services (NDS), BorderManager network services, and of course, IntranetWare. About half of the 50 Compaq servers hosting Connecting Points are running Windows NT. The cross-platform aspect of the system helps to make it more ``real world."
Fewer than 10 servers form the core of the system hosting the massive directory, the network's post offices and individual users' mail boxes. The other 40 or so servers run remote processes to speed the loading of data or provide redundancy to the critical core servers.
Connecting Points is not just a terrific service for harried Comdex attendees who can conduct business over the network; it's also a real-time proving ground for the vendors' products. Welch calls it a testing environment that can't be duplicated in any lab. Despite the fact that the network will be used for only five days, it still has to be as stable and robust as any real corporate network.
``We use the same (NetWare Loadable Modules), the same processes, the same core technologies as our customers," Welch says. Yet out in the open with 250,000 witnesses, this system can't afford to fail.
Many new products or suggestions for enhancements to products have been born out of the various iterations of Connecting Points since the network's inception in 1993. As the engineers use their own products to build an industrial-strength network, doing many of the same things users will need to do, they see firsthand where the products need improvement. These suggestions are then fed back to the product developers.
Without a doubt, users benefit directly from the resulting improvements. For example, at least 10 features were added to one developer's tool kit based on suggestions from the Connecting Points engineering team.
Take, for instance, the development of Novell Application Launcher. The product was conceived out of the need to control the desktop via NDS at a recent trade show. Likewise, the GroupWise Java Gateway product was given a thorough shakeout by the Connecting Points team, which provided valuable feedback to the product's developers. GroupWise Java Gateway was brought to market sooner, and with more stability, because of the engineers' input.
For Comdex/Fall '97, the implementation team perceived a strong need for distributing default messages to groups of users. This, of course, is a realistic need for enterprise network managers as well. Suffice it to say that Novell product engineers are already addressing this requirement with an object API gateway that's under development.
Another feature of Connecting Points that is likely to make its way into the commercial sector is the use of swipe cards to log on to the network. Comdex attendees have their logon names and passwords programmed into their show badges. All they need to do is swipe the card through a card reader at any one of the 250 PCs attached to the network for automatic logon. Several universities have expressed interest in this concept and are pressing for a similar workstation manager product.
If you're reading this column at Comdex, check out the Connecting Points network operations center at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Otherwise, get more information about Connecting Points from Novell at www.novell.com. You'll learn that the engineering team has tackled and conquered just about every challenge that a quarter million users can throw its way.
