Novell opens up directory strategy

By Christine Burns
Network World Fusion, 03/05/99

Novell over the next few weeks will begin the battle to persuade corporate customers to use the next release of its directory service instead of Microsoft's yet-to-be-released Active Directory.

Novell's release - which will be called Novell Directory Services Version 8 (NDS v8) - will be standards-based, more scalable and will have the ability to synchronize information contained in its own data store with that of other directories.

While NDS v8 won't ship for another 12 to 18 months, the company last week started briefing industry analysts, will hold a press conference next week, and will tell the whole story to 6,000 of its loyal users later this month at the annual Brainshare conference in Salt Lake City.

NDSv8 will be a native Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) implementation, which will make the directory service accessible by any client software, able to host any application and capable of interoperating with all other directory services that support the emerging LDAP standard, say sources familiar with the announcements. Novell already offers add-on LDAP support. But native support will provide end users with LDAP-based client software to get to NDS information more quickly. This deeper level support for LDAP will also provide better interoperability with other LDAP-based directories, such as those from Netscape and Oracle.

NDS v8 will run on multiple operating system platforms including NetWare, Windows 2000, Linux, Sun Solaris and IBM's OS/390 mainframe system. NDS v8 will use metadirectory features supplied by Utah neighbor NetVision that will allow the directory to automatically synchronize user information with Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange databases. And company officials say NDS v8 is so scalable that there is no limit to the number of directory objects it can hold.

As previously reported in Network World, NDS v8 will scale in two ways. For corporate use, Novell will make NDS simpler to distribute and easier to manage across multiple sites. Novell built NDS to be distributed from day one, but this release has features such as federated partitions, which let an IS manager establish autonomous segments of the directory according to corporate structure. For more centralized directories required by ISPs that want to offer Web services on a per-user basis, Novell has changed the underlying NDS database technology to hold huge amounts of directory data.

At the analyst briefing held this week in Boston, Chris Stone, Novell's senior vice president of strategy and corporate development, claimed that NDS v8 has been tested with up to a half billion objects -directory entries such as a user name, password, phone number or security certificate. The current version of NDS supports one million objects. As far as response time on a directory that big, one analyst who has seen a demonstration says it took only 3 to 4 seconds for the engine to return a query.

Stone told analysts that NDS v8 will serve as the linchpin for Novell's long-term Full Service Directory strategy. Information posted on Novell's Web site defines a full service directory as "a hierarchical database that manages discovery, security, storage and relationships between all users, devices, applications and services in and outside the corporate firewall."

Discovery lets user browse, search and retrieve specific information from the directory. Security controls access all the information that is stored in the directory. Storage is the database structure for the directory that gives customers the basic ability to save information in the database for future reference.

Industry analysts familiar with the overall plan say Novell's NDS marketing plan is a thinly veiled attempt to fend off the onslaught of Microsoft's yet-to-be-shipped Active Directory.

"Hands down, NDS v8 is impressive," says Laura DiDio, an analyst with the Cambridge, Mass.-based Giga Information Group. "And technologically, Novell has got a three to four year lead on Microsoft. But in reality Novell only has a six to nine month window to convince the world of that before Active Directory starts taking hold."

Novell must make some drastic marketing moves - such as reducing or even eliminating the $26-per-end user fee it charges for NDS for NT - so more folks running NT can get a look at NDS v8 before they see Active Directory, DiDio says.

Analysts are less convinced that Novell will make any headway in the ISP market where Netscape has been pushing its LDAP-based directory for over two years now.

"Netscape's done a much better job pushing the Internet applications that can tap into the directory," says Jon Oltsik, an analyst with Forrester Research Group in Cambridge: "Novell has its roots in the corporate world. I think they're going to have trouble breaking out of that without a really hot product soon."

NDS v8 was previously referred to internally at Novell as SCADS, which stands for Scalable Directory Services.