The reports are wrong, NetWare is still alive...Surrey County Council (SCC) has replaced its Windows NT servers with Novell NetWare in an attempt to cut costs by 42 per cent over three years. The £1m, three-year deal with Novell will see the council deploy the NetWare 6 operating system and implement a number of Novell applications, including iChain, Portal Services and the ZENworks family.
The council previously used both Novell and Microsoft, but the need to cut costs forced it to choose between them. "The main reason we moved to a single vendor infrastructure was because of the inefficiencies in supporting two different types of system," said John Edwards, head of technical services at SCC.
"We decided to standardise on Novell because we had a better in-house skills base for Novell," he added. Edwards explained that SCC wanted to enable its 5,000 workers to work from any of its 300 sites. "Workers can access their desktops from any site and the Novell ZEN products help us achieve this."
Other recent developments have seen the council implement a storage area network, a Tivoli backup system and 6,000 PCs as part of its wider IT investment. Surrey is one of 36 councils making use of the strategic enterprise agreement that Novell signed with the Local Government Association (LGA) last year. The deal guarantees agencies a three-year set price for licensing.