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. o
