REDMOND, Wash., Feb. 11, 2000 — Microsoft Corp. today announced test results that show the Active Directory TM service in Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Server performs exceptionally well in LDAP environments. Such performance is important because LDAP is the Internet-standard protocol for accessing data stored in directory services. These results demonstrate that Active Directory is ready for the most demanding e-commerce applications.
Specifically, KeyLabs Inc., a Novell Authorized Testing Site, found that Active Directory performed 2,376 LDAP-based full-tree searches per second on a 5 million-object directory. In contrast, Novell’s NDS Version 8, running on NetWare 5.1 with the same hardware and equivalent directory configuration, delivered only 307 searches per second. Such searches are common in applications ranging from e-commerce to e-mail.
“KeyLabs is the industry’s largest independent e-commerce testing lab,”
said Matt Mace, director of quality at KeyLabs.
“In each of the 96 LDAP-based tests we performed, Active Directory running on Windows 2000 Server exceeded the performance of Novell’s NDS Version 8 running on NetWare 5.1.”
In addition, KeyLab’s tests showed that Active Directory takes advantage of additional processors in symmetric multiprocessor (SMP)-enabled servers, while NDS Version 8 on NetWare 5.1 demonstrates no significant performance gains beyond a single-processor configuration. The tests showed that on average the LDAP performance of Active Directory improved by 100 percent when running on the four-processor server, while that of NDS only improved by 6 percent.
“Customers require an Internet directory based on high performance standards,”
said Mike Nash, general manager of Windows 2000 Product Management at Microsoft Corp.
“These results clearly show that Active Directory is ready to deliver the performance required by our customers to meet the most demanding needs of Internet applications such as e-commerce.”
Customers are also seeing the benefit of these performance improvements as they migrate from Novell NetWare to Windows 2000. Shared Resource Management Inc. (SRM), a leading solutions integrator, recently migrated from its Novell NetWare NDS environment to Windows 2000 for the company’s 100 users.
“After switching from Novell to Windows 2000, we saw a 500 percent performance increase when running our internal applications,”
said Tony Jurgens, manager of network solutions for Shared Resource Management.
“By using Windows 2000, we are now able to handle more workload with the same hardware and get quicker response times from our applications.”
KeyLabs’ tests were commissioned by Microsoft and performed on a Compaq Proliant 8000 with between one and four Pentium III 500MHz processors, 2 GB of RAM, Intel 10/100 PCI network adapters, and a Compaq SmartArray 3100ES RAID controller with seven 9GB, 10,000 RPM SCSI hard disks. KeyLabs developed its test using PERL scripts and industry-standard LDAP interfaces and ran the same tests against each directory.
Active Directory is the first directory service that is scalable, built from the ground up using Internet-standard technologies, and fully integrated at the operating system level. Active Directory includes performance features such as indexed storage for fast information retrieval, native support for LDAP to eliminate the overhead of query translation, and support for SMP architectures to maximize performance on a single server. More information about Windows 2000 and its Active Directory service can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/ .
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