Directory services are an essential part of today's network-centric computing infrastructure.
Directory-enabled applications now power almost all the mission critical processes of an enterprise, including resource planning, value chain management, security and firewalls, and resource provisioning. New reliability and scalability features include multi-master replication, chaining and multiple backend database support. New administration features include roles and class of service along with improved access control mechanisms. These advances in the design enable flexible deployment topologies that can be fine-tuned to the organizations' business requirements. This includes a method for partitioning the directory data to simplify the implementation of replication and provides virtually unlimited scalability.