All of these can be used standalone to host the Novell directory. Or they can be integrated with NDS eDirectory running on NetWare or any other supported platform in a mixed server environment. On top of the wider platform support, internally the directory service architecture has been radically overhauled. The same X.500 schema is deployed and there's the same proprietary data store, but it's now a proper database rather than a flat-file structure. More importantly, the most common attributes used by NDS are now indexed, mainly those associated with users and their authentication.
Tools are also available for developers to create indexes for any objects and attributes they add.
That means far less need to search through the tree when matching attributes, leading to much improved performance, particularly on very large directories. Server-side sorting of objects further helps the performance. Such increases help make NDS eDirectory a lot easier to use, with less waiting when logging on and when searching for objects on a large network. They also make the software a lot more scaleable. To put that into context, users of earlier versions were advised by Novell's own support group to partition directories with more than a thousand objects in order to guarantee performance.