Perhaps the best way to illustrate the advantages of DCE is to give a couple of examples. In today's ever-changing computing environments, services can reside on operating systems and computers supported by many different hardware and software vendors. Secondarily, UNIX servers are often scaled up to meet increasing usage demands by clustering several UNIX servers together. In order to provide secure and reliable access for each student, a directory or registry of each student's account privilege would have to be maintained on each of these systems. DCE provides a single directory that is accessible from the majority of software implementations available today.
Time management offers a second example.
DCE provides an answer and is busy synchronizing the times of all of the machines that it is responsible for. This activity is provided in the background, while work is given primary attention by the processor. We will talk more about Distributed File System, or DFS, in future articles, but one of the primary benefits of this software in a distributed environment is efficiency. DFS replaces this methodology with a much more efficient file processing solution. One of the primary server support functions implicit in any electronic mail and WWW service is file backup.