NOVL investors ... another nail in the coffin on Aug 4th PC week.
IBM to Link Disparate Enterprise Directores
IBM will provide by the end of next year a wide-ranging
family of directory offerings that attempts to span the
varied needs of enterprise customers.
The key will be IBM's DS Series, which will include X.500
and DCE (Distributed Computing Environment) directories
for high-end customers and a native LDAP (Lightweight
Directory Access Protocol) directory for low-end users.
DS Series, unveiled last week, also will offer metadirectory
capabilities that will integrate with third-party products, as
well as tighter links to subsidiary Lotus Development
Corp.'s Domino messaging directory.
DS Series gives IBM a family of directory products that
offers users choices and ways to integrate those choices,
which means enterprise customers can adopt new
directories and services without losing their current
investments.
"We have a DCE infrastructure, and one of the reasons
we chose [DS Series] was to interconnect unlike
platforms," said William Won, a vice president at Chase
Manhattan Bank, in New York. "[DS Series] extends our
DCE to the Internet and intranets with support for public
and private keys and also addresses through LDAP what
the rest of the IBM family and other vendors are doing.
"It becomes an enabling set of products that will take our
investment in DCE and move it forward," Won said.
DS Series, an Internet infrastructure layer of directory and
security services, includes an X.500 directory with support
for public key security and storage of digital certificates, as
well as DCE directory services that natively feature
Kerberos private key security.
- snip -
And while most vendors offer either a single directory or a
metadirectory that ties different directories together, IBM
offers both.
DS Series works by layering on top of multiple operating
systems. It will run on all of IBM's operating systems, as
well as on Windows NT and SunSoft Inc.'s Solaris in the
next 12 months.
Further down the road, DS Series will offer high availability
through the addition of platform-independent clustering
technologies next year that will make all the Network
Computing services more scalable.
-more snips-
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Not only will this product compete with Netware, but they didn't even think it was worth writing a gateway for it. IBM is making a universal directory service that supports <almost> every protocol in the universe, except for NDS.
Hmmmmmm.
My $0.02 is still, if your long on NOVL, you're wrong. :) |
