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Network World, 09/27/99

Back in 1997, Microsoft and Cisco envisioned integrating directory services and network hardware as a way to build intelligent networks.

The pair dubbed the vision Directory-Enabled Networks (DEN), collected an industry Who's Who of support and set out to build brains into the hardware brawn that wires every corporate network.

Those brains, they said, would deliver better network performance, management, security, reliability and quality of service (QoS). Users and applications would be handed graded levels of service on switches and routers, based on a set of policies stored in a directory.

But by 1999 the vision has grown fuzzy.

Cisco and Microsoft handed off DEN to an independent standards body, the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), in September 1998. But as DEN progressed, vendors got ahead of the standards work by extending DEN to meet their own requirements. This has led to bewilderment and products that don't interoperate.

The DMTF rewrote the specification and wisely added it to Common Information Model (CIM), a framework that enables the integration of management systems. But the damage from DEN's early days still blackens the standard's reputation.

Those who are not confused are simply unaware, which may be even more deadly to DEN's future.

DEN - what's that?

Thomas Nolle, president of CIMI Corp., a consultancy in Voorhees, N.J., says there is such little knowledge about DEN among end users that his company cannot achieve enough of a statistical sample to generate a survey. "Development of DEN, like work in the ATM Forum, will only show users that the technology is too complex to deploy," he says.

Others agree that understanding is lacking.

"IT is still trying to get a hold on DEN," says Dave Kosiur, an analyst with The Burton Group in Midvale, Utah. "The bottom line is that for someone who needs DEN throughout the enterprise, it is not ready."

Work continues, however, and this fall a significant milestone is expected when the DMTF releases the policy model for DEN as part of CIM Version 2.3.

CIM 2.3 includes the DEN policy model, which is the final of three models comprising the specification. The policy model defines the rules and policies used to implement QoS. It balances the other two DEN models: physical and logical. The physical model represents pieces of the network that can be labeled, such as chassis, line cards and cables. The logical model defines things such as IP addresses for interface ports, protocols and subnets.

"DEN has gone from development to done in roughly 18 months," says Ray Bell, director of engineering for Cisco and one of the creators of the DEN specification. "Now it's up to vendor implementation."

Bell says Cisco is now in pilot with four large service providers that are building DEN systems for deployment in the fall. Cisco also has ported Microsoft's Active Directory to Unix for use with Cisco Networking Services to create a DEN architecture.

Disaster in the making?

But if vendor implementation follows its current pattern, it could be chaos for the enterprise.

Major hardware vendors, including 3Com, Cabletron, Cisco, Lucent and Nortel Networks, have grabbed onto the DEN acronym, but their "DEN-compliant products" don't interoperate.

"There is a sea full of directory islands out there," says John McConnell, president of McConnell Associates, a consultancy in Boulder, Colo. "You have one directory for 3Com and another for Cisco. Hopefully, CIM 2.3 will help to integrate these point solutions."

Users are left asking how network resources can be provisioned, as DEN proposes, without interoperability over a host of vendor products. DEN can't reach its promise unless an agreement is reached on the specification and interoperable components are delivered. Neither thing exists, but the former is closer to reality than the latter.

"The vendors have gotten way ahead of the standards work," says Charles Muirhead, president of Orchestream, a DMTF member that develops a policy-based server for the enterprise. "The DEN concept is solid, but relying on the directory or DEN to deliver multivendor policy-based networking is a high risk right now."

Orchestream, Hewlett-Packard and Ukiah Software, which Novell recently bought, are trying to lessen the risk.The three vendors have policy servers that act as middleware to tie together hardware devices from multiple vendors.

But even those devices carry the same surprise for network executives as DEN -- the need to write policies for network resources. The job is a complex task for any size enterprise.

"It's not like IT guys have experience with the concept of creating policies. They're starting from scratch," Kosiur says.

Some say DEN is doomed from the start. Nolle is even moved to quote Shakespeare's Macbeth when he thinks about DEN: "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Related links

Contact Senior Editor John Fontana

Other recent articles by Fontana

The metafix
Is the metadirectory the true enterprise savior? Buzz Issue, 9/27/99.

The DEN-CIM Connection: A Roadmap to Directory-Enabled Networks
PDF presentation from a Birds of Feather presentation by the DMTF at N+I'99 in Atlanta.

N+I: The future, courtesy of Network World
Network World, 09/16/99

Novell acquires Ukiah Software
Network World, 06/24/99

A DEN for the BEASP
Network World, 03/01/99

Net Resources: Directories
Primers and more. Network World Fusion.

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