News from PANUG - October 4, 2001
http://panug.org

AD OUTPERFORMS NDS!

Douglas Howard sent in this article that was sent out in one
of Windows 2000 magazine's broadcasts. It mentions Active
Directory (AD), Novell's NDS, and the Netscape Directory
Service now owned by Sun and simply called "iPlanet". The
article claims that AD beats NDS and iPlanet in performance
and cost.

It's no surprise that either AD or NDS outperforms
iPlanet as the article claims. We've known this for quite
a while. But for AD to outperform NDS! Unbelievable.

Sharp readers will recognize the name "Mindcraft" mentioned
in the article as one of the sources for these claims. If
this name means nothing to you, you don't remember the holy
war that erupted, about two years ago, over Mindcraft's
benchmark testing that showed that Windows NT outperformed
NetWare, Linux, and Solaris. The Linux, Solaris, and NetWare
user communities were outraged over these findings and we
heard later that the benchmark tests had actually been
conducted by Microsoft employees at a Microsoft location.

This should have put an end to Mindcraft, but they're back
and the article's author, Paul Thurrott, doesn't mention a
word about Mindcraft's questionable reputation and ethics.
Read the article but consider the source. Here it is:

---
When Active Directory (AD) debuted in Windows 2000 eighteen
months ago, industry experts dismissed the technology as a
first-generation product that wouldn't scale well or meet
customer needs. Many--myself included--predicted that AD
adoption would be slow and recommended that customers
investigate this solution cautiously. But something
interesting has happened in the intervening months:
Microsoft reported recently that 75 percent of its customer
base was at various stages of deploying AD. And although I
don't put much stock in Microsoft's press releases, a
discussion with the company regarding AD led to some
interesting--and unmonitored--conversations with Microsoft
customers who've rolled out AD in large environments at
enormous savings. If you dismissed AD as a "1.0" release, as
I did, you might be surprised to discover the successes some
people are having with it.

I began by discussing AD uptake with Perry Anton,
Microsoft's AD product manager. Anton told me that AD was
seeing wider deployment than the company expected, in a
variety of situations, which the company breaks down into
small, medium, and large organizations. Microsoft worked
with Mindcraft, an independent test lab, who delivered a
somewhat unsurprising study--given the source--showing that
AD is not only cheaper than competing solutions, but
delivers better performance.

The Mindcraft study report addresses directory services that
include an extranet component--that is, a portion of the
directory's functionality is exposed through Web
applications outside the local network. According to the
report, AD delivers the best performance ever in this
category, by 19 percent, in a 1-million user directory. And
AD's performance with a 15-million user directory is
comparable to massive UNIX solutions that cost millions
more. The report concludes that Microsoft is delivering an
enterprise-class directory solution, with record-breaking
performance, outstanding scaling, and low total cost of
ownership (TCO).

The report alone did little to change my attitude about AD.
After all, Microsoft and its competitors regularly publish
such reports. But some of Anton's figures are intriguing.
Anton told me that a 15-million- user AD performs on par
with a 1-million-user iPlanet platform running on Sun
Microsystems hardware and uses 12 fewer processors. And the
Sun solution was processor-pegged: It was running at full
capacity, whereas the Web servers running AD hit only 60
percent capacity during the tests.

But Microsoft's offer to let me speak unconditionally with
customers rolling out AD was intriguing. Microsoft mentioned
several corporations, including Cincinnati Financial and
Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, that had been happily
surprised by the scalability, performance, and price of AD
solutions. I elected to speak with John Reynolds, the senior
advisor and technical architect for e-business at Anthem
Blue Cross Blue Shield, who is responsible for one of the
largest AD rollouts in the United States. His frank and open
discussion about AD won me over.

"When we were looking for a modern directory, one of the
first things we did was to check out the analyst reports on
these solutions," Reynolds told me. "Gartner [Group is]
extremely conservative and tends to reiterate the truth--
what we already know. Gartner said that Microsoft wasn't a
player in the directory space, but no one had really
implemented [AD], and no one had proven that it could work.
Gartner wasn't offering any new information, but the company
did recommend an IBM directory service. Was it truly a great
product? No. Does it do multimastering? No." Reynolds
decided he needed to look into these solutions himself, and
eventually the choice came down to Novell NetWare and AD,
based on the functionality he needed and the capabilities of
the respective solutions.

"Hands down, there was a huge gap between those two
solutions and the next one (iPlanet)," he said. "And all but
NetWare, [iPlanet], and Microsoft are still stuck in the old
master-slave mode. So [the choice] came down to AD and
NetWare. Novell's price, off the street, was $7 million for
a 15 to 20-million-user directory, and we negotiated that
down to $4 million. Microsoft's price was the cost of the OS
and some Internet-based client licenses. Microsoft wanted to
come in and implement it, which included $50,000 in support
services, for a total of $150,000. It was no contest."

Reynolds says the uninformed perceptions about AD have to
change. "Microsoft's solutions scale both up and out. We
wanted 15 to 20 million users, so we called Compaq, EMC, and
Oracle and asked them to work with Microsoft to make this
[implementation] happen. Not only did the companies agree
[to work together], but they delivered [the solutions] and
proved that AD is scalable. AD outperformed NetWare and
iPlanet on Sun using only half the processors and exhibited
consistent, controlled growth from 1 million to 8 million to
20 million users. AD doesn't plateau out as the Sun solution
[did]."

Another common misconception, Reynolds says, is about
Microsoft's use of standard technologies. "We figured that
[Visual Basic] (VB) and other Microsoft applications had
proprietary APIs that enabled them to bypass [Lightweight
Directory Access Protocol] (LDAP) and work natively for
better performance, but we were wrong," he said. "They go
through standard LDAP. [AD] is very compliant as a product.
The only thing that AD [does] differently is build [its]
schema objects, which isn't a big deal. But using standard
LDAP allows us to interoperate with a wide range of
applications on various platforms."

So is AD a scalable, cost-efficient platform? Perhaps, and
I'm starting to think that Microsoft might have finally
gotten something right the first time out. Of course, the
next version--due in early 2002 with Microsoft.NET Server--
will offer performance and functionality enhancements,
better UIs, and other changes. But I'm interested in whether
AD is making the grade with our readers. Are you rolling out
AD? And what was the deciding factor?

Paul Thurrott, News Editor, thurrott@win2000mag.com

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