Banyan injects new life into Vines OS with major changes

Banyan has released version 7.0 of its Vines network operating system (NOS). The main strength of Banyan Vines has traditionally been its directory service, called StreetTalk, and its ability to handle networks with millions of computers attached. To complement these factors StreetTalk for Windows NT has been released to allow users to completely integrate NT into a Banyan network.

Additional features in Vines v7.0 include the StreetTalk explorer which is an interface to the network directory service that allows users to explore the directory in a manner similar to the Windows 95 explorer interface.

Other features include an overhaul of Banyan's file system which was based on AT&T Unix. As such, it could not address disk partitions larger than 2Gb which was a limiting factor. The updated file system supports long filenames, double-byte-character sets and extra international languages.

StreetTalk for Windows NT presents a key benefit to administrators who need to build large NT networks. Previously Banyan offered enterprise network services (ENS) for various platforms. This allowed users to access the StreetTalk directory on a Vines machine from a foreign platform, such as NetWare or other Unix versions. To do so, a Banyan Vines server needed to be present somewhere on the Lan to host the StreetTalk database.

StreetTalk for NT allows administrators to host the entire StreetTalk network on NT if required. Consequently it is possible to build a large NT network without resorting to Microsoft's domain structure under Windows NT. StreetTalk for NT is the only directory service currently available under NT; Novell has stated its intentions to port its NDS NetWare directory services (NDS) to NT but it is not likely to happen before the end of 1997.

NDS remains a NetWare administration tool: it does not provide an easy way for users to locate a specific network resource. NDS is based on a tree structure, with all the resources at the bottom of the tree and the various organisational units above. This means that you need to know where something is in the NDS tree in order to know which branch to select, so that you can ultimately access the required resource.

Banyan: (01293) 612284.