SALT LAKE CITY -- A billion gets your attention.
Novell exec highlights work to be done on NDS
By Scott Berinato, PC Week Online
March 23, 1999 12:26 PM ET
SALT LAKE CITY -- A billion gets your attention.
Stewart Nelson knows this, which is why his company, Novell Inc., demonstrated Novell Directory Services storing 1 billion objects here at the BrainShare user conference. But Nelson, senior vice president of the products group for the Provo, Utah, company, is more interested in other NDS achievements and shortcomings.
"The billion gets everyone's attention," Nelson said in an interview Tuesday with PC Week Online. "But it wasn't a complex tree. The most interesting thing about Scads [now called NDS v.8 ] is not that it can store a billion objects, but its performance with 10 to 20 million objects in a tree."
Indeed, in the NDS v.8 demo, a search of the huge directory took only a second, and opening a view of one of the 100 million object containers took just 10 seconds or so.
"That's the patent," Nelson said. How NDS was able to maintain the performance, he said, is what will sell users on the technology.
Nelson said one-eightieth of the billion-object tree was cached in RAM, but those accusing Novell of cheating are wrong. Users, too, will cache parts of their NDS trees.
Work to be done
One of the key markets for NDS v.8 is that for service providers, and Nelson admitted that Novell's work there is not done.
He listed three areas of development Novell wants to address in forthcoming upgrades. The highest priority: tying together NDS with Domain Name Services.
"We've addressed much of the performance issue with LDAP," he said. "Right now, number one on my list is the DNS-NDS integration."
Second, Novell is working on an event system for event notification and administration. Third, Novell plans a federated architecture for the directory. (Federation refers to the distribution of roots. Directories are hierarchical, usually with a single root atop the entire service.)
A federated directory creates multiple roots to eliminate a single point of failure and to create the independent communities within the directory that are central to Novell's DigitalMe technology and other services such as commerce.
And with so much ISP infrastructure running on Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Solaris operating system, Nelson knows Novell needs to port NDS v.8 to the Unix platform.
NDS v.8 for Solaris and NDS v.8 for NT, which will be developed concurrently, are still two to three months from beta, Nelson said.
What you don't know
Like many Novell executives here, Nelson mostly refrained from taking shots at directory service rival Microsoft.
He did, however, complain about several claims the Redmond, Wash., company made last week about the ability of Novell's NDS for NT to work with the forthcoming Windows 2000.
"The claims just were false. I thought it was a new low for them," Nelson said.
He added that one of the demonstrations here this morning -- showing NDS for NT storing 80,000 objects -- was done specifically to refute Microsoft's claims.
Nelson doesn't take the competition lightly. Although Novell has access to Windows 2000 and Active Directory beta products, he thinks the shipping version of the product could end up far different from what he's seen. And the uncertainty is worse than competing head-on with a product.
"Active Directory is a real threat," he said. "I wish it would ship tomorrow."
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