Sun's Identity Team have been busy over the summer! On Oct. 9, 2009 the Identity Management Team announced the release of Directory Server Enterprise Edition 7 and Role Manager 5. Next Wednesday, Oct. 21 at 8:00am PT, Neil Ghandi (Role Manager Technical Product Manager) and I will be giving an overview of some of the great features that exist in the new releases. Here are a couple of highlights:
What's New with Directory Server EE 7.0
• Boosts speed and performance: DSEE 7.0 has been optimized to improve performance of some operations by more than 3x the current version. In addition, this release provides hardware optimization with up to 60% improvement in authentications and modifications. • Reduces Total Cost of Ownership– Reduce cost by using the only solution in the market that provides customers with a directory server, virtual directory, proxy server, web console and Active Directory synchronization tool-kit under a single license. • Hassle Free Upgrade – DSEE 7.0 provides a simple upgrade path and provides 5x performance improvement in data import times, thereby reducing migration costs.
What's New with Role Manager 5.0
• 360 Degree View of Assigned Access – A unified view of data related to user access that empowers reviewers to make more intelligent decisions concerning users access. • Closed-loop Remediation – A complete end-to-end solution for reviewing user access and removing inappropriately assigned access. • Rule Life-cycle Management – The first solution for managing the complete life-cycle of role assignment and SoD audit rules.
Interested in hearing more? Interested in hearing more about the release and what business problems it solves for your enterprise? Register here for the Webinar here:
Topic:
Improve Compliance, Access Controls, and Performance with Sun's Latest Releases of Role Manager and DSEE
If you haven't noticed, Oracle published this ad to Sun Customer's today in the Wall Street Journal. Just in case you missed it, you can see it here. As an ex-coach and former water polo player, the quote resonates. The Directory Server Enterprise team continue to deliver. Watch this space as we get ready to release DSEE 7.0.
Our very own, Ludo Poitou will be presenting with other luminaries in the identity industry at The 2nd.International conference on LDAP, LDAPCon 2009 will be held on September 20th and 21st at Waterfront Marriot Hotel , Portland OR, USA.
LDAP is gaining renewed attention as the identity repository for enterprise, telco's, global partner networks, healthcare and education institutions. The LDAP repositories have been faced with massive growth over the last five years and the performance and availability they have come to rely upon is being tested.
New requirements driven by the growth of users, the explosion of security requirements imposing more "writes" and the access to web services security and policies are forcing LDAP experts to look at new innovations.
You should attend, if you want to be apart of hearing how LDAP experts are innovating and addressing these business and technical challenges. If you haven't registered yet, please register NOW here!
The registration fee includes access to the LinuxCon 2009 (Sep 21 - 23), and if you still need to be convinced that it's worth attending, you can check the agenda here.
This is going to be a fun week for three simple reasons. One, we are releasing the next version of the OpenDS SE product this week continuing to prove that Sun is an innovation company. Two, Burton Catalyst is this week in San Diego and the Identity Management team will be there to listen, learn and evangelize. Three, the US Water Poloteam enters the medal round of the FINA World Championships.
First, the latest release of OpenDS contains three innovations that are important to customers that need a high performance directory server in their identity architecture. Identity architecture's are evolving. The traditional arguments of choose a directory purely because of it's read performance will not suffice as identity data is being updated by multiple applications to meet security and policy requirements. This does not mean that read performance and stability are still the critical requirement it just means that the pendulum is swinging to include more read performance. This is why we are excited about the early performance testing results that we are seeing in OpenDS with 14,000 writes per second. Here is a link to some other performance testing data on the Nehalem platform for those of you that like to get into the weeds.
Second, Burton Catalyst is happening this week in San Diego. This conference is always a favorite as they do a great job of attracting real identity and security practitioners in one location. This allows for a real exchange and learning experience for all of us that that want to move identity security forward. If you haven't done so already and want to attend here is the information.
Lastly, the US Water Polo team made it out of the preliminary round into the elimination round and will play on Tuesday at 21:00 CET. This will be at 12:00pm PT. I have been watching the games I can and the highlights on Universal.com. This is where the internet shines and changes the world. It is so powerful that those of us that support sports like water polo, swimming, etc can not consume the content we want via sites like NBC Universal when traditionally the mainstream media could not afford to distribute this content. The internet has provided that low cost channel. Sun Microsystems helped provide the technical platform for NBC Universal during the Olympics and it was a huge success. I am not sure if Sun is helping with the FINA World Championships but I am still supporting the site. I hope you will as well.
Identity management in government is a very important topic as it crosses a number of domains. There are a number of issues as government's across the world pursue e-Government initiatives. Norway is a great example as they have launched a portal to allow citizens to opt into services that they wish to consume from the government (e.g. postal, doctor, etc.). The government portal in Norway uses OpenSSO. This is only one of the ways in which Sun is helping governments further information sharing and reduce the cost of providing citizens and organizations the services they need to be successful.
If you are interested in hearing more about the different way's Sun can help governments help solve Identity Management issues such as the following, please attend the following webinar.
Secure control over information access by dynamic and diverse user populations
Single sign-on and identity federation for seamless operations across multiple IT environments
Automated provisioning and deprovisioning to reduce costs
Delegrated and self-service account management to improve the user experience
Auditing and reporting to meet internal security and compliance requirements
I wanted to pass along a quick note about an upcomming webinar on Directory Services which will be held Wednesday, May 20. The webinar will cover how to reduce cost and improve the speed and performance of your enterprise using directory services. The conversation will go over the following:
How to use save cost by consolidating identity sprawl in your enterprise
How to meet agressive time-lines on a merger and acquisition
How to federate faster with virtual directories
If you are interested, please sign-up here. Even if you are not able to attend, registering will give you access to the replay.
If you attend and want to see what I look like, the picture to the left was captured at the European Identity Conference by the very serious people at the Daily Mail the bastion of great journalism in the UK.
As I mentioned last week, David Kearns, wrote a great article a few weeks back titled "Pimp My Directory". It is rare that you can use a theme for a blog entry twice in the same seven day span but when you here results like this I hope you agree....Sun is pimping their Directory.
Benoit Chaffanjon did an interesting "Benchmarketing" (you have to read his blog to understand why he calls it that) that showed Directory Server Enterprise Edition may be able to support 450,000 + LDAP operations per second. The benchmarketing was done on a Sun Blade 6000 using the Intel Xeon x5560 on OpenSolaris. All the gory details can be read in Benoit's blog here. This is mind-blowing when you consider the cost of transaction per second and also what this might look like on an SSD. We are doing some further testing as Mark Craig mentions in his blog not only to validate these amazing results but also to confirm the performance using OpenSSO and on a SSD.
The team is back from our successful trip to the European Identity Conference. Ludo and Mark Craig did a great job on the Identity Bus and Virtual Directory panels. I will have more about this later in the week.
I wanted to pass along a quick note about an upcomming webinar on Directory Services which will be held May 20. The webinar will cover how to reduce cost and improve the speed and performance of your enterprise using directory services. The conversation will go over the following:
How to use save cost by consolidating identity sprawl in your enterprise
How to meet agressive time-lines on a merger and acquisition
How to federate faster with virtual directories
If you are interested, please sign-up here. Even if you are not able to attend, registering will give you access to the replay.
David Kearns recently wrote an article for Network World called "Pimp my directory" so when Matt Swiftwrote me about some interesting results from OpenDS Performance Testing, I could not resist borrowing the title to show what we are doing at Sun to innovate in OpenDS. Now before I go to far into the detail I will offer the following disclaimer that the data being represented here are results from preliminary performance testing on OpenDS. It is indicative of true performance and we are proud of these early results but we also are doing more formal performance testing, like we always do at Sun, to ensure these are more than just marketing benchmarks.
Matt Swift and the OpenDS team deserve a lot of credit for thier great work because they are radically reducing the total cost of ownership for running a directory server. Here are some of the latest statistics. I will let Matt explain the gory detail on his blog but the bottom line is that with a 10M user test on a X4150 with 8CPU's and basic internal disks the team was able to perform between 12,000 and 14,000 modifications per second. Yes.....Modifications!!! Imagine what this would look like on SSD's. Watch this space as we pimp our directory.
Lastly, this is just a small example of why Sun Open Source is the best in the industry for enterprises that need commercial grade software. The unit testing and performance testing our teams do before we release a milestone or commercial version is the best in the industry. Every day we put our reputation on the line as we expose builds for people to use in production environments. Each daily build of OpenDS has 10M user test performed against it. Each Milestone build has a 30M user performance test run to ensure data centers have telco grade software to run in their environments.
Ludo Poitou and Mark Craig from Sun Microsystems will be a part of two illustrious panels at the European Identity Conference today. Ludo will be a part of the panel talking about the Identity Bus which is a topic that Felix Gaethens, Kim Cameron, and David Kearns talked about last year. The discussion should be interesting becasue Sun has some of the products necessary to create the "identity bus" today through OpenDS, DSEE, Virtual Directory, OpenSSO, Identity Manager Connectors, and Netbeans, You don't need all of these to create the bus but a standards based way of storiing and accessing identities and then leveraging them via other applications or into the cloud are all possible using the tools at Sun.
Mark Craig will be joining Oracle, Radiant Logic and Symlabs in talking about Virtual Directories and their importance to Directory Services. Sun includes it's virtual directory features as a part of it's core product and license so all customers who use DSEE 6.3 today have a virtual directory already as a part of their license. Mark will be explaining how customers are using Virtual Directory to do data center consolidation, simplify mergers and acquisitions, and federate faster using Sun's Virtual Directory.
Yesterday concluded the MySQL Conference for me. It conincided with take your Daughter to Work day in the United States so I took my daughter to see a presentation about OpenLDAP and MySQL Cluster. Howard Chu did a great job providing a technical overview of his use of LDAP to MySQL Cluster (content I wanted to hear) and playing the violin during his presentation (providing content my daughter enjoyed).
Yesterday, Ludo did a presentation for the Glassfish Aquarium project at Sun who use USTREAM to broadcast their content to anyone interested in engaging with the team via this medium. The content is interesting and this is a better way to make presentations more engaging as not only do they provide the video feed but also a twitter mashup for interactive feedback from the audience. If you agree and want to see additional innovators using the internet to engage with their community members in a more engaging way then you should check out Leo Laporte on Twit.tv. I have been following the work that Leo Laporte has been doing with FLOSS, MacBreakWeekly and SecurityNow where he is innovating how to provide video content via the web. He has in effect created his own broadcasting company. SecurityNow has done some recent podcasts on the conflicker worm and the recent cyberespionage that has been in the news which is interesting and informative.
For those of you that missed Ludo's presentation on OpenDS. Here is the video.
The third day at MySQL Conference was a lot of fun. We did a presentation on how to integrate MySQL into Enterprise Identity Management Framework. We talked about several of the following ways Sun Microsystems does this. We discussed the role of Virtual Directories as ways to access attributes within LDAP and MySQL applications to create a single authentication point. This could be used as organizations try to integrate applications within a merger or acquistion, for organizations attempting to Federate with partners, etc. Additionally, we talked about the role of LDAP to MYSQL within the new release of MySQL Cluster 7.0. It is now possible with OpenDS to store data within a clustered database to combine the best of LDAP and Transactional Clustered databases.
Additionally, we talked about the new adapter that the OpenSSO team is creating that will allow customers to use MySQL as a user repository. The Agent that the team is creating is on their roadmap for July release later this year. We talked also about the increasing need for webservices security inside companies and capabilities of OpenSSO to help organizations provided that added security.
Lastly, we talked about Identity Manager and Role Manager and the ability for Identity Manager to connect to MySQL and thus allow organizations to provision users into applications built on MySQL. Also, in Role Manager MySQL can be used as a datawarehouse for role mining and reporting.
Additionally, Felix Gaethens from Kuppinger Cole wrote an interesting article comparing the Oracle and Sun Identity Management offerings. It would be interesting to hear your thoughts on their analysis. It is as Felix says in the article and interesting mental exercise.
Tuesday at the MySQL Conference in Santa Clara was a lot of fun. MySQL Cluster 7.0 announced their latest release of their high availability and scalable database architecture (read the release here). The carrier grade version of the product will provide support for OpenDS LDAP to MySQL Cluster driver. There were over a 100 people at Johan Andersson's presentation on using MySQL Cluster 7.0 presentation at 5:25 last night. The team walked through high availability reference architectures and a high level overview of the LDAP to MySQL driver options. It is powerful for companies that need a standardized way to integrate applications using LDAP and need transactional distributed data architecture for auditing or relational integrity.
At 7:30pm we had a Birds-of-a-Feather session with about 15 people who wanted to go deep on a couple of different ways to integration LDAP to MySQL. We talked about the value of virtual directories and the ability to connect to MySQL for authentication. We see this a lot with mergers and acquisitions. Additionally, we talked about building authentication and authorization routines for MySQL into LDAP. Lastly, we went deep with the Alcatel Lucent team on some high availabity and LDAP to MySQL. It was a great discussion. Here are the slides.
If you want to meet Ping Luo (a technology manager on the OpenSSO team and the celebrity that helped launch the Ping Identity vs. Sun video funfest last year) come by our booth. He will be in the Sun Identity Pod from 10-1:30pm today. Here is the video and Ping's response.
The Identity Management Team will be at the MySQL and RSA Conferences this week in Northern California. If you are into security or building innovative applications for the enterprise then this is an exciting week.
It is an exciting week as we will be talking about our work between MySQL and Identity giving customer's the maximum choice to build solutions. We have a Birds of a Feather presentation on Tuesday evening at 6:30 in Ballroom C, where Ludo Poitou, the Community Manager for OpenDS, will be talking about how to use MySQL and Directory together as identity repositories. We will be talking about some new news at this BOF and hope you will be there to hear this exciting news.
Twitter is a great tool during conferences as you can hear where the great presentations are occurring and in some cases and sometimes get advanced warnings of topics that might not be of interest to you. Here are the twitter accounts that I will be following: (or you can follow me @nwooler)
What is it like working on an open source project? A lot of people wonder how does it differ. The nightly builds, the open nature of communication and involvement, the external contributors and the community managers like Ludo Poitou make it a very dynamic environment. The best way to understand it is to watch this great video that Ludo put together that represents the last three years of activity.
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Our very own, Ludo Poitou will be presenting with other luminaries in the identity industry at The 2nd.International conference on LDAP, LDAPCon 2009 will be held on September 20th and 21st at Waterfront Marriot Hotel , Portland OR, USA.
First, the latest release of 
CET. This will be at 12:00pm PT. I have been watching the games I can and the highlights on 
government's across the world pursue e-Government initiatives. 
