Novell Announces TUXEDO System For NetWare 4 And Windows NT

Integration With NetWare Directory Services and New Administration System to Greatly Expand Enterprise Options

SUMMIT, NJ -- May 30, 1995 --Novell, Inc., today announced two new supported platforms for its market-leading TUXEDO transaction processing monitor -- Novell NetWare 4.1 and Microsoft Windows NT. The new platforms will provide customers with additional cost-effective, flexible options for deployment of secure, distributed client/server applications in enterprise environments, including seamless integration of TUXEDO for NetWare with NetWare Directory Services (NDS). Novell also previewed new enterprise features for its next release of TUXEDO, including a new, graphical, workstation-based system for centralized administration of distributed applications.

TUXEDO, running natively on NetWare, enables customers to easily and securely access the business-critical application components they need outside their NetWare environments, anywhere in the enterprise, while leveraging their existing NetWare investments. The integration with NT will provide much needed transactional capabilities to customers using NT Server in their distributed computing solutions.

"Transaction systems, and TUXEDO in particular, are beginning to play key roles in the development of an increasing number of applications in Fortune 500 companies," said Jim Johnson, chairman of The Standish Group. "Although many of these companies are implementing transaction-based applications, more and more are using transaction systems to implement three-tier client/server applications because of their reliability, scalability and interoperability. Modern transaction systems, like TUXEDO, transcend the basic transaction processing functionality by providing the infrastructure for application component development and execution environment."

New Platforms for TUXEDO

The integration of TUXEDO with NetWare will support an array of low cost, high performance computing solutions. Existing NetWare servers can be configured as powerful access points to line-of-business applications. For example, an existing NetWare server in a branch office used for personal productivity or local database operations can now also provide a transparent link to line-of-business applications running elsewhere in the organization, or assume some of that processing locally.

The integration of TUXEDO with NDS makes solutions more cost effective and easier to manage by providing a common directory for access to TUXEDO applications and NetWare based resources. "TUXEDO provides very powerful TP capabilities to NetWare," said Toby Corey, vice president of the NetWare Products Division. "With TUXEDO for NetWare we are providing customers with significant new application processing capabilities, and the ability to access mission-critical, client-server applications," he said.

TUXEDO for NT will provide much needed transactional and high availability capabilities for NT applications, and access to enterprise data and applications. TUXEDO for NT will enable NT to be used as another platform in three-tier TUXEDO client/server installations.

TUXEDO Application Management Plans

The next release of TUXEDO, available in the fourth quarter of 1995, will contain additional functionality and several expanded features. One feature, which expands TUXEDO's capabilities well beyond traditional transaction monitors, is the new administration and management subsystem. It enables an administrator to manage and monitor highly complex distributed applications from a single graphical workstation.

Joe Menard, vice president and general manager of Novell's TUXEDO System Division, explains, "Modern distributed transaction processing monitors do much more than their name implies. TUXEDO's sophisticated application-to-application communications, combined with a new administration console, will allow an administrator to easily manage all application components of a distributed solution."

The administration system is based on Motif and provides an easy-to-use, graphical representation of application components, system events and configuration data in an enterprise-wide client/server application. Statistics can be displayed for individual machines and represented as a single system-wide view, essentially managing the "virtual mainframe created by TUXEDO." This enables the administrator to optimize system usage, increases the flexibility to change installations on the fly, and ultimately provides an easier to manage environment, helping reduce life cycle cost of ownership. In addition to Novell's own graphical administration system, Novell will also provide integration in subsequent releases with popular third party management frameworks through SNMP agents.

The TUXEDO administration system will also provide additional security with Access Control Lists (ACLs) at the user and application service levels, enabling administrators to permit or deny access to application components by user or groups.

The pre-release of TUXEDO for NetWare will be available in June of 1995, with the commercial release shipping in the fourth quarter. In July, a pre-release of TUXEDO for NT will be available, with the commercial release shipping in the fourth quarter, following the release on NetWare. Both NetWare and NT will be enhancements to TUXEDO System 5, bringing the number of platforms directly supported by Novell to 11, and increasing the platform offerings for TUXEDO to more than 35 server environments. This enables customers to have freedom of choice and protects their investment in dissimilar hardware.