When size really doesn't matter
By Michael Surkan
April 5, 1999 9:00 AM ET
The capabilities of high-end sports cars are breathtaking. Who can fail to be impressed by vehicles with more than 500 horsepower and suspensions firm enough to handle sharp turns at over 200 miles an hour?
Nevertheless, except for race-car drivers, these engineering marvels are largely irrelevant to everyday use. Who would really want to drive on the typical poorly maintained freeway at 150 mph? Just how often does anyone accelerate from 0 to 60 in 3 seconds?
Seen in this context, the race to build the world's biggest directory service is similarly irrelevant. In Utah last month at Novell's BrainShare conference, engineers touted the ability of NDS Version 8 to handle up to a billion objects. (See the Labs' review of the NDS 8 beta.) The audience of thousands of VARs and CNEs was treated to an awe-inspiring spectacle of searches in this directory behemoth that returned results almost instantaneously.
This may be the kind of stuff that creates talk around the water cooler, but in the real world, who really cares? Novell product managers admitted that none of the company's customers have even 10 million objects in their directories, let alone 1 billion.
To be fair, Novell is only trying to defend itself from the avalanche of Microsoft press releases extolling the raw power of Microsoft's upcoming Active Directory. Microsoft has been bragging about AD tests with 20 million, and even 30 million, objects. With a challenge like that, Novell had to respond.
Out of touch
This race to prove which directory is the biggest has become surreal. Only a handful of organizations have ever created directories with even 1 million objects. In fact, the problems companies face in rolling out corporatewide network directory services have very little to do with product scalability. Hierarchical directories, such as NDS, have long since surpassed the capacity requirements of most networks. Instead, issues of administration, flexible construction and standardization have become the roadblocks to adoption. The fact that precious few third-party applications are directory-enabled to take advantage of a single user database and security model has done far more to limit the implementation of large directories than any performance obstacles.
All the talk about incredibly huge directory tests is enough to make one wonder if Microsoft and Novell haven't lost touch with the needs of their customers altogether. Instead of boasting about size, why doesn't Microsoft announce it will provide a simple pruning and grafting tool to move users between domains in Windows 2000? I'm far more eager to hear about improved NDS replication performance over WANs than a report on how Novell engineers have synthetically created a directory with a billion objects that can't even be backed up.
Eventually, there may be a need for the massively huge directories Microsoft and Novell are talking about. One day, the Internet will likely contain a single directory listing most everyone on the planet along with their public encryption keys. But a lot of standards and deployment issues will have to be resolved before we ever reach that point.
High-performance sports cars may be impressive, but when I'm stuck in traffic during rush hour, I'd rather have a car with a comfortable seat, air conditioning and a stereo than a sleek shell and a hard chair.
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