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NOV-BR98.DOC -- 19980327 -- Various emails on BrainShare'98
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Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1998 18:28:35 -0700
From: Joe Doupnik <JRD@CC.USU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Client32 install on Win 95 PC

>Welcome back Joe...you or other brainshare attendees wouldn't be
>planning to post some of the high point for us less traveled pikers?
---------
	After I catch up on sleep I will submit some brief notes on
Brainshare 98/USA. A quicky is Oracle is adding a five user version to
NW 5, and if my memory is still working then to also INW 4.11. General
reaction to that was very positive.
	I did not take notes on talks etc; no time for that.
	Most of my time was spent on the lab floor discussing matters with
engineers and managers of particular products. The layout was huge and the
number of products corresponded. All in all, an excellent arrangement to
cover one's bases without walking miles or playing telephone tag. The
Novell folks on the floor did a super job, and that is saying a lot about
a highly repetitive situation that went all day for five days.
	This year's attendence looked to be the usual 5K count, at US$1.5K
each for entrance (Novell employees pay the same, ouch).
	The NSS group demonstrated a 1+ terabyte disk array being shut
down willy nilly and restarted. Mount time clocked at 15 seconds in this
early code. Nothing lost though the outage. NSS volumes don't use Vrepair
either. This is a transaction style file system, unlike regular NW stuff.
One can have as many files and as many volumes as one likes, without
adding more memory or more mount time. At the moment volume sys: must be
regular flavor, but a lot of pressure is being applied to have sys:
converted in the NW 5 release box rather than later on.
	The NRS group has some patches coming out shortly, so keep an eye
peeled. It's an underrated nifty product.
	Clustering technology is marching ahead on a productized basis,
as contrasted to the Wolf Mountain tech demonstration. Orion is the code
name. More on this later, but it looks attractive and the guys doing the
design and writing are really sharp. This product will roll out in phases
as the technology is shaken down and embellished.
	Java is all over, and products are piling onto it rapidly. NW 5
supports full Java natively and reportedly as fast as one can go on the
same (Intel) hardware.
	Border Manager is charging ahead full steam, as it ought. ZEN
(Zero Effort Networking) is new and growing like crazy; it is the client
manager/push technology/NAL/etc mechanism.
	Fault tolerance is becoming a major goal. Hence Orion and hot plug
board swaps on display. There will be lots more on fault tolerance as time
goes on, with the goal being to *never* shutdown the server. Fans can be
replaced live, lan adapters added and reconfigured live, disks and
controllers too, the whole nine yards. Nothing was said about the software
patch situation.
	Joe D.

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