Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Synchronization versus Virtualization

Interesting blog post over at Novell's Volker Scheuber about synchronization versus virtualization. Volker talks about one of the disadvatages of virtualization:

All data is always available as long as the central identity vault is available. In a virtual directory implementation, some of the delegated data source may not be available and requests may return no or only incomplete data.

EXACTLY!

And, how do most vendors get around this problem? Well, in most cases you get the option to cache the data in case the delegated data source is not available. If you cache the data then what do you have?? Answer = a metadirectory.

There are use cases for virtualization but don't think that virtualization is that different than a metadirectory. Volker does mention one very important use case: politics - the 8th layer of the ISO stack. It's typically easier to implement a virtual directory than a metadirectory since virtual directories pull from data sources whereas a metadirectory usually is implemented to both push and pull data but you have to engineer the virtual directory against failure or incomplete responses. Architecturally, having to rely on the network - and the underlying directories or databases - for real-time response is difficult.

Either way, a rose by any other name...

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2 comments:

Unknown said...

I laughing so hard I'm crying. While I was at Microsoft I was called a lot of things but never an "ignorant slut".

Get back in your corner old man...

Love,

Jackson

Mark Mac Auley said...

Ahhh, references to SNL back when it was truly a classic...

I have found it interesting that companies still seem to be tap dancing around a key component of identity infrastructure - the single authoritative source. Some of the solutions I've seenhave been more cumbersome and expensive than if they had just hit the reset button and built one from scratch vs. putting a new coat of paint on a sh*tbox...