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Tucson, Ariz.--Artisoft, Inc. recently unveiled a significantly enhanced version of its LANtastic network operating system, which it intends to pit against Novell, Inc.'s NetWare 2.2 software.
Artisoft said LANtastic Version 4.1 offers 20% to 30% better performance than earlier versions, providing users with a viable alternative to Intel Corp. 80286-based versions of Netware.
The software release comes on the heels of industry reports that Novell may curtail NetWare 2.2 upgrades in order to encourage users to migrate to NetWare 3.X versions. Novell recently denied those allegations (see "Novell pledges to stand behind NetWare 2.2," page 14).
Adrian King, vice-president of engineering at Artisoft, based here, said LANtastic is continually being compared to NetWare Lite, "but the more comparable product has always been Netware 2.2." He added, however, that because LANtastic was not as fast as NetWare 2.2, many users did not consider the two comparable.
"We tried to address the features of (NetWare) 2.2 in this release--one of which was performance--to remove the final barriers to people choosing NetWare 2.2 over LANtastic," King said.
In addition to performance improvements that Artisoft said puts the software on par with NetWare 2.2, LANtastic Version 4.1 also includes better system management to help administrators install larger networks.