NDS 8.0: Over one billion objects
served
By ROBIN SCHREIER
HOHMAN
Network World, 04/19/99
Beta testers trying out Novell Directory Services
(NDS) Version 8.0 have stumbled upon an unintended
game: Stuff the Directory Tree.
Several early users are putting the next version of
NDS through the usual paces - compatibility, ease of
installation and functionality - but users seem most
intrigued by its ability to support up to one billion
objects. An object is virtually anything in a network,
including computers, routers, programs, files and
people. Because the NDS database structure is
hierarchical, it is represented by a directory tree to
show categories and subcategories within that
structure.
Gary J. Porter, a systems programmer at the
University of Kentucky, is busy trying to find NDS
8.0's limit. "I'd like to find out where it will break, but
my meager resources won't stretch to find its bounds,"
he says.
It's more than just a game, however. For
MpoweredPC, a division of Maritime Telegraph and
Telephone in Halifax, Nova Scotia, it's a business
proposition. The telco is building a digital subscriber
line network to support LAN services sold to
businesses and home users. The division's plan is to
sell the network and software on demand.
That kind of business is an administrative nightmare,
and MpoweredPC's chief technology officer is
counting on NDS to help him. "Our initial estimates
were that we needed about 100 million objects in the
directory [to support on-demand service]," Monty
Sharma says. "We were wrong," he says with a laugh,
pointing out that revised estimates peg his needs at
closer to 30 billion objects.
Sharma says he's been able to load NDS with more
than one billion objects, and he hasn't seen a
performance hit. He's pressuring Novell to give him a
ceiling, but he says so far the company says it hasn't
reached a limit either.
Sharma's not unrealistic, though. Even if he has to run
20 trees, he'll be satisfied.
Peter Cruikshank, network supervisor at the
space-enabled warfare systems command for the U.S.
Navy, doesn't need that many objects to centrally
administer his network. "Being the Navy, one million's
not beyond our capability," he says, pointing out that
figure is more than previous versions of NDS allowed.
Cruikshank's goal is to create a single point of
administration, including his Windows NT and Sun
Solaris machines. He is also looking forward to
integrating with Lightweight Directory Access
Protocol-enabled directories for synchronization.
At the University of Kentucky, Porter had to do a lot
of planning to allow 22,000 students to log on to the
network from 18 points around campus. Now,
administration is almost easy. "Hire a new systems
administrator, send him/her to a one-day seminar, and
you have an NDS expert," he says. "That should make
me worry."
Porter also likes the backward compatibility of NDS
8.0. "Because they kept the upper structure similar to
that before, the programming API set did not change,"
he says. Therefore, code written for NDS 7.0 will
work with NDS 8.0.
MpoweredPC's Sharma says Novell has met
everyone's expectations for the next few years. But
Novell still has work to do if it wants to beat
Microsoft's Active Directory when it's released;
Microsoft has marketing muscle about which Novell
could only dream.
One way to beat Microsoft is to get more software
vendors to write applications that take advantage of
NDS. |
