We built it. More than 10,000 accounts were created in the first two weeks of the fall semester. We now have more than 25,000 accounts, all in a container named Users. The Rules of Partitioning Besides the layout of the NDS organizational units, we had to make decisions about partitions and replication. A large NDS database is divided into pieces, called partitions.
Several servers can be host to replicas of any given partition.
One reason is for the sake of robustness. Any one server can crash and burn, but delivery of directory services information continues from a replica on another server. Another reason for using replicas is to prevent all NDS reques ts from traveling over a slow or expensive wid e area link. Instead, a local replica can service such requests. A third reason is that while restoring NDS from tape works fine in a simple environment, Novell strongly discourages this technique in a multiple-replica environment, except in the case of catastrophic failure.