DSEE 7.0 is available for download today here with new documentation here. The critical document you want to look at is the upgrade and migration guide here.
Directory Server Enterprise Edition 7.0 Boosts Speed and Performance:
Considered one of the best extranet LDAP Directory Servers in the market today, the latest version of Directory Server Enterprise Edition allows enterprises to accelerate growth in a simplified way, improve performance and lower total cost of ownership. Directory Server Enterprise Edition 7.0 has been optimized to improve performance by more than three times when compared to its predecessor. In addition, this release provides innovations that improve authentication and modification performance by 60 percent, allowing customers to accelerate their applications without changing one line of code.
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.
You can see a webinar we did recently on DSEE 7 and Role Manager 5 on why this release is important to your business and how this can help your company meet growth goals and reduce your total cost of ownership.
The Sun Identity Management team will be giving a webinar next Wednesday to discuss the very important topic of Identity Management and healthcare. As the healthcare legislation moves through congress the increase of 36M patients on healthcare providers, insurance companies, and patients will be profound. The cost savings projected by the bills will rely on IT systems to provide increased access to information to drive productivity gains. As we have seen with recent high profile identity security breeches at hospitals identity security is critical in making sure the right people have access to the appropriate information, that information must be shared with all members of the value chain securely.
Sun's Identity Management Suite provides a powerful package of solutions to help with storing identity information with Directory Server Enterprise Edition; managing authorization, federation and web services security with OpenSSO; providing provisioning solutions with Identity Manager; and, defining and managing role based access control with Role Manager.
Join this free Webinar to learn how Sun's identity management solutions can help your organization to:
Automate management of digital identities for other providers, patients, physicians, clinicians, and payors Provide single sign-on (SSO) and secure federated access to privacy-regulated healthcare information while adhering to strict mandates
Comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), internal security policies, and corporate governance policies with complete auditing and reporting capabilities
Sun identity management solutions make it easier for healthcare organizations to manage and share digital information.
SAVE THE DATE - Wednesday, December 2, 2009 Sun Identity Management User Group Session Grammercy Park Room Sun Microsystems, 101 Park Avenue, New York, NY
The Sun Identity Management User Group will meet for its next session at Sun Microsystems, 101 Park Avenue, New York, NY on Wednesday, December 2, 2009.
We are still finalizing the agenda and I will publish in this blog as soon as it is ready.
Yesterday, Neil Ghandi, Matt Hamlin, Etienne Remillon and I gave a quick overview of what is new in Directory Server Enterprise Edition 7 and Role Manager 5. Here are just a few of the great highlights that were discussed during the presentation. Of course, you can get the full video embeded below. Lastly, if you are interested in seeing more events like this you can go to the webinar site here.
You can download the slides here. You can download the video here.
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.
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.
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.
The identity team was in London for the Gartner Identity Access Management conference last week which was a successful event. We had the opportunity to meet and talk with some great customers and hear about the Thompson-Reuters implementation of OpenSSO and Directory Server Enterprise Edition serving 300,000 concurrent users with persistent cookies. This implementation allows traders to get their Reuter's feed on their smartphone and their desktop without having to login twice. This reduces transaction fees and keeps their business model in tact. The OpenSSO team did some great engineering work to meet the performance and functional requirements for Thomson-Reuters. We video-taped the presentation and should have that for your soon.
Also, Ludo Poitou was recently featured in an article on OpenDS in the Architect Zone or DZone. He describes some of the exciting things happening in the community with MySQL and discusses how to embed OpenDS in applications. This is a great jump-off point for customers getting started with deploying OpenDS as an identity repository for their application or infrastructure serving email, calendar or network infrastructure. You can read the whole article here.
I must confess that I am an optimist. Although, recently I think we all have been tempted to take trip over to the dark side even if only for a moment. Two recent blog posts have pulled me back to the proper side and to see the Glass Half-Full again. One, by Jonathon Schwartz who in his extremely eloquent and illustrative style reminded everyone why Sun is more relevant than ever. Two, Daniel Raskin, who posted an interesting blog on Oracle's fortunes during the downturn. I encourage you to read both.
Each explains why Open Source software like OpenDS, OpenSSO, Glassfish and ZFS (btw...great podcast on ZFS with FLOSS Weeklyhere) are more relevant in this market than ever before. As developers around the globe search for a platform of innovation they choose based on capability and price of acquisition. They have more time than money. In the economic downturn that we are all suffering through globally may have impacted trade balances, balance sheets and salaries but it has not impacted people's inclination to innovate. This is why Sun and Open Source are more relevant than ever. As Jonathon points out in his overview of Finance 101:
Not to dip into finance 101, when the net present value
of a lifetime revenue cycle exceeds the value of a one time purchase, a
product or service that initiates the payment stream is either freely
distributed (if it has no marginal cost, like software), or subsidized
(if it has a hard cost). That's why you see so many free credit cards,
free checking account, free mobile phones, free month's rent, free
social networking, etc. In the technology world, free is the new black.
Juxtapose this with the news from Daniel Raskin's blog about the current fortunes of Oracle and you wonder who has the right competitive advantage for this current economic environment.
As I travel and talk to customers about Identity, I have heard similar stories from customers. One comes to mind where a customer shared that he had an intern that he asked to investigate OpenDS. Instead of coming back with a slide deck containing a cost benefit analysis and a feature comparison he came back at the end of the week with a working prototype. After showing it to key stakeholders, the decision was not about whether it was the right technical choice, rather it was about when to put it in production and how could they get budget to pay for support. The value of open source is breaking down barriers to innovation.
This is why I see the Glass Half Full. People in tough times don't stop innovating. They just choose different problems and different platforms to innovate upon.
DSEE 7.0 is available for download today here with new documentation here. The critical document you want to look at is the upgrade and migration guide here.
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The Sun Identity Management team will be giving a webinar next Wednesday to discuss the very important topic of Identity Management and healthcare. As the healthcare legislation moves through congress the increase of 36M patients on healthcare providers, insurance companies, and patients will be profound. The cost savings projected by the bills will rely on IT systems to provide increased access to information to drive productivity gains. As we have seen with recent high profile identity security breeches at hospitals identity security is critical in making sure the right people have access to the appropriate information, that information must be shared with all members of the value chain securely.
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. 
