Novell NetWare
Once the network operating system of choice for all but a few networks, NetWare's popularity has declined significantly over recent years. However, NetWare is still widely used in many environments, including government and education. The latest version of NetWare, version 6.5, continues Novell's tradition of providing feature rich enterprise class network operating systems.
One of the features that really put NetWare on the networking map was Novell Directory Services (NDS). Like Microsoft's Active Directory, NDS (which has been around since 1994) is a directory services system that enables network objects to be stored in a database. This database can then be divided and distributed among different servers on the network. These processes are known as partitioning (the dividing) and replication (the distribution among servers on the network). Although introduced as NDS with NetWare 4.x, Novell has now renamed the product eDirectory and made it platform independent.
Like the other network operating systems, NetWare is a full-featured operating system that offers all the functions required by an organization, including file and print services, DNS and DHCP servers, and FTP and Web servers. NetWare also supports a wide range of third-party hardware and software.