NetWare

NetWare is a discontinued computer network operating system developed by Novell, Inc. It initially used cooperative multitasking to run various services on a personal computer, using the IPX network protocol. The final update release was version 6.5SP8 in May 2009, and it has since been replaced by Open Enterprise Server. The original NetWare product in 1983 supported clients running both CP/M and MS-DOS, ran over a proprietary star network topology and was based on a Novell-built file server using the Motorola 68000 processor. The company soon moved away from building its own hardware, and NetWare became hardware-independent, running on any suitable Intel-based IBM PC compatible system, and able to utilize a wide range of network cards. From the beginning NetWare implemented a number of features inspired by mainframe and minicomputer systems that were not available in its competitors' products. In 1991, Novell introduced cheaper peer-to-peer networking products for DOS and Windows, unrelated to their server-centric NetWare. These are NetWare Lite 1.0 (NWL), and later Personal NetWare 1.0 (PNW) in 1993. In 1993, the main NetWare product line took a dramatic turn when version 4 introduced NetWare Directory Services (NDS, later in February 2004 renamed eDirectory), a global directory service based on ISO X.500 concepts (six years later, Microsoft released Active Directory). The directory service, along with a new e-mail system (GroupWise), application configuration suite (ZENworks), and security product (BorderManager) were all targeted at the needs of large enterprises. By 2000, however, Microsoft was taking more of Novell's customer base and Novell increasingly looked to a future based on a Linux kernel. The successor to NetWare, Open Enterprise Server (OES), released in March 2005, offers all the services previously hosted by NetWare 6.5, but on a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server; the NetWare kernel remained an option until OES 11 in late...