Yes I read the article Jim. Exactly what does that prove regarding the fact the NDS is already turning the third corner of the Directory Services race as Inactive Directory is still stumbling to get out of the gate?
The article was pretty well written (even for PC-Week's standards that are usually high on the MSFT biased side and poorly researched) but one clear mistake in the article relating to NetWare was that the article stated NOVL makes claims that NetWare has an SMP kernel. In fact until a few months from now, NetWare is SMP capable IF the applications are written to take advantage of SMP. The soon-to-be-released NetWare 5 "Six-Pack" will allow all its system services (NLMs) to be fully SMP-aware. With this version all the processors in the system will load-balance the demands from the NOS. But the article is correct in that there are very few corporate demands that can put enough load on a single NetWare server with a large processor and RAM. Unlike NT that usually needs SMP just to get adequate performance for even light corporate loads. Industry studies have estimated a 5:1 ratio on NT to NetWare servers in performance.
But regardless, this whole article had absolutely nothing to do with Directory Services. Jim, you are like so many that get a NOS and a Directory Service completely mixed up. A DS should be not be NOS specific and reliant. NOVL's NDS is only a few short months away from completely achieving this goal. In fact, NDS is even now found on Intel OSes (NT, UnixWare, shortly Linux), non-Intel platforms (Solaris, AIX, OS/390, etc.) and even non-server platforms like routers, firewalls, switches, gateways, etc.
MSFT will likley NEVER see Inactive Directory perform on any other platform NOS other than NT for the forseeable. This will prove to be a huge failing point for MSFT and its customers.
NDSv8, is a MAJOR milestone revolution beyond the current NDS in that it has separated the NDS functions/protocols from the datastore. This allows it to use different databases and scale to the already proven 1 billion object level (and the scale has still not been reached). Inactive Directory - when it ever shows its lowly v1.0 head - will have a theoretical max of 10 million objects (and most technical analysts know how effective a 10 million object Inactive Directory will function like with its fundamental design still based on DOMAINS). NDSv8 also has a native implementation of LDAPv3.
So I will repeat myself....
Active Directory officially falls further behind in the Directory Services front...
Toy |
