A virtual directory can solve many of the access and identity management issues faced by today's enterprises. That is certainly a strong statement, and the following is an explanation of how well-designed virtual directories meet such lofty expectations. Most organizations have more than one enterprise directory, and potentially a large number of applications that need to access identity information. Moreover, some pieces of identity data typically reside in relational databases or other data stores.

Symlabs Virtual Directory Server can present a consolidated view of identity data. Existing IT infrastructure can be integrated into this view by using Virtual Directory Server's virtualization, mapping and transformation features. Symlabs Virtual Directory Server acts as a middle layer between directory servers and applications that need to access them. It appears as a directory server to applications and receives their requests, which are then analyzed, potentially rewritten and sent to the proper data store. When entries are returned by data stores, application-specific transformations, aggregations and mappings may be applied to the data.

Solution

Virtual Directories solve the problem of fragmented identities - different attributes for a person distributed among directories or databases. A modern identity management solution overcomes this problem by virtualization: Symlabs Virtual Directory Server makes it possible to aggregate all this information into one or more views. Applications "see" Virtual Directory Server as a unified directory that provides common views of the aggregated data.

Directory Integration

While virtualization is a valuable method to resolve several difficult issues, Symlabs Virtual Directory Server offers unique features to solve application integration issues. Often, applications use different schemas and data formats. Virtual Directory Server easily converts between these to accommodate each application without costly and time-consuming application modifications. The advantages: higher scalability and dramatically reduced administration costs.

It also simplifies multiple directory integration. Often, multiple directories contain different users that need be joined into a common user base. A frequent challenge with mergers and acquisitions, as well as with organizations that deploy Microsoft Active Directory in a forest configuration, it easily and seamlessly merges these user bases into virtual directory views.

Benefits

Unparalleled Scalability and Performance

Symlabs Virtual Directory Server is the fastest on the market. Ask for our benchmarks or test it yourself. Our common-sense approach to software development eliminates potential bottlenecks at the design phase. Performance, stability and scalability have been principle design goals from its inception - not an afterthought. This is evident in real-world, large-scale deployments where it consistently and reliably performs under demanding conditions. The bottom line for customers: the world's fastest virtual directory - highly scalable with a small footprint. See what it can do: Download and evaluate Symlabs' Virtual Directory Server today!

Symlabs' Virtual Directory Server makes your directory infrastructure highly-available. An extensive set of algorithms has been elaborated to monitor servers and route around any potential problem. Virtual Directory Server is currently running in mission-critical environments at organizations all over the world. Many of these deployments involve very high performance demands and enormous numbers of entries numbering to the hundreds of millions.

Solution

Automatic Failover

Directories are typically deployed with replication enabled. This makes perfect sense, because when one directory server goes down for any reason, another server is standing by to take the load. However, applications are usually not capable of using a stand-by server when the primary server is down.

Virtual Directory Server creates a fail-safe environment by routing around unavailable directory servers. This happens in a transparent way, where operations that have not yet been responded to are automatically re-sent to a backup server when a primary server goes down.

Multiple Failover Algorithms for full Flexibility

When implementing high availability for your directory infrastructure, one size does not fit all requirements. Depending on the replication strategy used, some failover mechanisms work well, while others can be counter-productive. The failover algorithm must provide high availability without compromising data integrity.

That is why Symlabs Virtual Directory Server comes with a variety of different failover algorithms designed for the different scenarios in which directory infrastructure can be deployed. For example, for multi-master replication, the affinity algorithm is advisable, because it avoids requests sent to both masters at the same time, therefore avoiding potential replication collisions. The multisite algorithm is ideal for organizations with disaster recovery sites across multiple sites, allowing a weighted prioritization of connections on a per-site basis. There are several other algorithms to choose from, depending on the replication strategy used.

Health Monitoring

Virtual Directory Server supports health monitoring by periodically checking each server's state. Whenever servers go down, immediate action is taken and traffic is rerouted accordingly. When servers come back up, depending on the failover algorithm chosen, connections are either switched back or remain on the server that has last been known to be working.

Health monitoring is fully configurable - from the operation that is sent to the time that Virtual Directory Server should wait before considering an operation as "failed" or not. Operations can be retried several times before a server is designated as down.

Alerts and Notification

Virtual Directory Server integrates easily into a monitoring system, as it is able to generate alerts whenever certain events occur, such as servers going down or coming back up. This can be integrated into an organization's monitoring system. Symlabs Virtual Directory Server also supports SNMP in client and server mode, making it easy to send traps upon occurrence of definable events.

Symlabs Virtual Directory Server enables the deployment of extremely large directories with hundreds of millions of entries. In fact, these deployments cannot be done in a safe and reliable way without a component such as Virtual Directory Server's unique partitioning feature, which is currently in use by several wireless carriers around the world, supporting directories of up to 180 million entries with more than four thousand operations per second.

Virtual Directory Server supports very large directories by partitioning single large sub-trees over multiple servers. When applications connect to Virtual Directory Server, they "see" the entire directory in one piece, even though the information is actually distributed over several individual directory servers, also called "partitions".

This partitioning is necessary because of the following reasons:

Safety/Reliability: If for any reason data needs to be reloaded, it is much faster to reload data into multiple smaller partitions than into one large directory.

Performance: Very large directories start to "creak" after several million entries and do not scale well. In order to guarantee good scalability and performance of the directory infrastructure, it is advisable to chunk the data into several smaller partitions.

"Virtual Directory Server is extremely scalable - hundreds of millions of entries, massive throughput - with exceptional performance."

Solution

High Volume Traffic

Companies often face performance problems as soon as new services are added that make heavy use of existing directory infrastructure, or when existing services become popular. When high volume traffic, i.e. a high number of requests hit the directories, bottlenecks start developing and tend to aggravate the problem by causing repercussions beyond the directory infrastructure. This can cause a loss of revenue, disgruntled customers and/or employees as well as a nightmare for administrators and IT directors.

Symlabs Virtual Directory Server is ideally suited to boost the performance of existing directory infrastructures by using a unique multi-pronged approach of several specially crafted algorithms that offer load balancing between equal servers and connection pooling.

Directory Customization for Complex Requirements

Virtual Directory Server makes it easy to add customized business logic to any LDAP transaction. Every operation type can be intercepted, and conditions are evaluated based on where an access is coming from, how a current connection is bound (authenticated), and any other detail known about the current operation. An action can then be taken, which is completely customizable using a simple but powerful scripting language called DirectoryScript.

Using this customization mechanism, existing customers are using Virtual Directory Server to implement business logic ranging from special routing of requests to managing the recharge lifecycle of prepaid mobile phone subscriptions.