In the past few years, many companies have abandoned Novell NetWare in favor of Microsoft-based networks. The pundits had us believe this was the best way to serve our enterprise IT needs. It's rare to find a company that has migrated the other way - from Microsoft to Novell - yet that's exactly what Extraco Banks in Temple, Texas, did. And the company is very pleased with the results.

Extraco is a midsize bank that provides mortgage, insurance, investment and banking services. Three years ago, the bank operated six sites but since then, it has grown by 500% and now has 17 sites. One of the bank's IT managers says his department could not have kept pace with the company's rapid expansion under the older Microsoft infrastructure.

Lee Underwood is a network and security administrator at Extraco. He says that three years ago, the company was a complete Microsoft shop. There were eight people in the IT department maintaining systems for the six locations. As the company planned its growth, Underwood knew the demands of the Microsoft environment would put too much of a strain on the already overburdened IT group.

At that time, the company had 26 servers at a central site. Each branch office had two servers - one to run Active Directory and another for the bank's applications. T-1 links tied the branches back to the central office. Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) on Windows NT 4.0 was used to manage all servers.

Underwood cites numerous problems with this configuration. The IT team had to restart the servers almost weekly to install new patches - too many patches, in his opinion. Bandwidth to the remote servers was routinely fully consumed, causing servers to "disappear" from view of the management software. SMS couldn't handle installation of all new users and applications, and IT staffers had to make time-intensive visits to work sites.

Also, additional IT personnel would be needed to support the bank's planned growth, but there was no budget to do so. The existing team was already busy working overtime, troubleshooting problems rather than adding to the bank's business value.

Extraco decided to migrate to NetWare 6.0 and a suite of other tools from Novell, including ZENworks and GroupWise. The 26 Windows servers were consolidated to just five NetWare servers. Lee says the NetWare servers are much more efficient. A single-processor NetWare 6.0 server outruns an eight-processor Windows 2000 server by 70%. Utilization on the NetWare server is about 5%. The same hardware configuration running Windows 2000 generates 60% utilization statistics.

Linda Musthaler is a principal analyst with Essential Solutions Corporation.