Jeff Zukowski

In order to deliver the examples described in the first part, network operators (I'll call them Telcos for convenience, but the world is changing and so are the players) generally want and need players of another type, the application service providers (ASPs), to step in and help to create the complete end-to-end service that a user experiences. By providing applications and services that run over the Telco's network, ASPs provide a valuable piece of the puzzle. This is because the level of demand, pace of development, and variety of possible services would strain even a Telco's resources if they tried to chase them all and develop them in-house, by themselves. But, in order to take advantage of ASPs as part of their services architecture, Telcos must expose their network infrastructure to these outside companies.

An ASP-Telco "symbiotic" relationship has the potential to create some truly interesting services, but it requires that each party take risks. For ASPs, the risk of innovation is pretty high - if they create something that nobody wants, it can be a total loss. And even if they have success, they need to be careful to protect their intellectual property. But, the ones that are successful can make money on a global scale through the power of a Telco channel, and the capital investment required for an ASP is modest compared to a network, so there is plenty of motivation for risk-taking. For Telcos, a rapid path to new service offerings with a big selection of potential ASP partners (therefore a big selection of innovative services) translates into maximum efficiency for investing their own resources. More important, it delivers the ultimate reward of an exciting network that attracts new subscribers, retains existing ones, and generates new traffic while also increasing existing voice and data volumes. In today's highly competitive environment, that's a path they simply must be on to ensure their survival.

What about that thorny issue of opening the network to “outsiders”? That, of course, is the major risk for Telcos. By doing this, they let others introduce components that could severely impact their traffic engineering or interfere with network management. But, the tools they already have are generally sufficient to maintain control of their network resources. The more unpredictable and unmanageable problem is security – and this doesn't just mean security for the Telco, but for any information flowing through the network.

In the type of infrastructure that we're heading for, where services are created through a mashup of applications and transports, the protection of sensitive information is a very complex issue. Sensitive information is a multi-dimensional problem in this environment because every party involved in the service transaction has some of their own at stake, and must respect some from the others.

For a Telco, the first task is protecting access to their network, which they have historically accomplished by being “restrictive”. In the new environment, maintaining an interface that appeals to a wide range of ASPs is critical to attracting them. That means letting them express their applications fully on the network without forcing them into major developments to match some unique API. At the same time, Telcos need to keep on ensuring the safety of information that they move about to protect the personal data and identities of their users.

ASPs, on the other hand, during their shorter history, have operated in a more open and collaborative environment than Telcos. Keeping their user information and identities secure has been something they've managed to accomplish while inter-operating with a wide variety of partners. But, they have enjoyed the freedom to manage their applications in a far less demanding and far more forgiving service environment than the infrastructure we're heading toward. Soon, minor issues they handled easily such as obsolete or redundant identity information in their user directory, or incomplete data and record update problems, become major problems in a global-scale service which is supported and branded by a Telco that demands a spotless image to make gains against their competitors. If they exposed customers to identity theft, massive spamming, or other scams through their service, they'd be responsible for a public relations disaster befalling their Telco partner which would seriously damage the relationship, not to mention their own public image.

In order for this architecture to work nicely, all the players need to be able to trust the others to do their part for security. They can see that that this requires a common set of standards that everyone embraces for these security functions, one that lets any ASP work with any Telco to create end-to-end services for any customer. Certainly vendor-specific standards could be used (and doubtless will be in some ways – more on that later), but a more flexible solution is an open standard that ensures ASPs and Telcos can inter-operate no matter what their platform choices. From our view so far, SAML 2.0 and ID-WSF are ideally suited for this, and are well positioned to become the solution of choice. These standards are a centerpiece of our identity management products, so a legitimate cry of favoritism is acknowledged, but in actuality this is not a heavily biased opinion. We support other standards, including vendor-specific ones, in Symlabs Federated Identity Suite, and this position is based on our work with all of them. It is a collection of our experiences in customer deployments, and perhaps more important in demonstrations and trials with the larger community of organizations seeking good real-world solutions that has led us to this viewpoint.

This is a good place to pause for now, but in the next (and last, I promise) part of this discussion I'll go into a bit more detail on how SAML 2.0 and ID-WSF standards can operate to everyone's benefit in this architecture.

Pablo Sánchez

Most people are regular users of various mapping and location services on their desktop, and now a lot of folks use location services on their mobile phones as well. When coupled with GPS-enabled phones, these familiar applications take on a new usefulness by reacting to changes in the user's environment. Similarly most people have established communities that shape their online activities according to relationships and interests. While for some it's still email and IM that manage their communication with those communities, for many it's rapidly evolving from a combination of those plus Web 2.0 tools on the desktop to mobile interfaces that give them rich interaction with their friends, families, business associates, interests, and urges whenever and wherever they choose. And it's becoming clear to many of us that this is a sweet spot for mobile applications - not just what media can I access, but how can I utilize it now, who can I share it with now, where can we meet to experience it now, and what can make accomplishing that easy for me ... now.

The application that most recently prompted me to write about this is Wizi. Wizi is the free location sharing and traffic information application that won first prize in the Orange API and Widget contest. (You can get it at www.wizi.com.) It has obvious uses for families or business people who are coordinating a schedule because it combines some key attributes of daily life in a dynamic, real-time way - where relevant people are, their destinations or meeting places, how they'll get there, and what's in the way. It can do similar duty for groups with other interests, such as when you want to choose between attending an after-work party, joining some friends for a dinner and a movie, or going a football game where you'll see lots of acquaintances who cheer your club. And, these are the obvious uses - only the collective imagination of a Web 2.0 enabled world can tell how it goes from there.

So, what does a company that specializes in Identity Management, Virtual Directories, and LDAP have to do with any of this? I'll suggest an answer to that by posing a different question: how much of the information that needs to be shared in the scenarios above would YOU like to have cross all groups? While you may want your family members to have your location at any moment in time, is that something you'd like visible to all the members of the football club? And for that matter, would you be pleased if your preferences such as football club or other affiliations was open to all your business colleagues? For most people, their real-time location and their affiliations are things they want to share very selectively. And, after you give it some thought, you'll probably agree that we're only scratching the surface in conceptualizing the schemes we'll really want to have for managing information that discloses our real-time, activity-centric, choice-driven self as it becomes a dynamic attribute in our daily lives. It's about TRUST - who and what gets it, when, and where.

In the collection of networks and applications that support delivering this vision on mobile phones, there needs to be an infrastructure that allows this identity information to be accessed and moved quickly, shared securely, managed actively, delivered flexibly, and operated on automatically in order for the end-user experience to be powerful, satisfying, and easy-to-use. And, if it isn't, then there won't be a sweet spot, after all. This, of course, is where Symlabs specializes - in that infrastructure and in the sharing and management of that information. That's why we've been working with Wizi on APIs, with BT and Intel on Identity Capable Platform (more on that later), and with Liberty Alliance on Advanced Client and Trusted Modules. Sound complex? It is, but in Part 2 I'll talk a little bit about how those technologies come together and how they work to deliver an efficient, trust-enabled platform that hits the sweet spot.

Pablo Sánchez

"In the beginning ... was the command line" (an interesting, but a bit outdated essay by famous author Neal Stephenson) is the best way to describe how our family of products started. A long time ago (in a galaxy far away) Symlabs began with an extremely fast and robust multi-protocol proxy engine, designed to give large LDAP deployments functionalities that existing LDAP servers could not provide. It was impressive by itself, and it has become the "core engine" of our products today, since its extensive programming capability has allowed us to keep on building new features and functions. Even now, we're pretty sure that we have barely scratched the surface of what can be done with that engine.

But, let's face it, it was not the easiest tool to configure and work with - its extreme "command line" approach was bucking the trend that most enterprises were following. That's why we created DSGUI, our name for a Java-based graphical user interface that makes managing configurations much easier. DSGUI allows end users to start working with both Symlabs LDAP Proxy and Symlabs Virtual Directory Server in a matter of minutes. This feature has allowed us to serve more than the "big IT & Telco" shops that had the resources to work without a GUI, and has been a success from the start for a wide range of customers.

But, the addition of DSGUI was not without some resistance, as a few developers (let's call them "Masters of the command-line", from now on - MOTCL) still hold the idea that graphical interfaces are for the weak and feeble. Still, DSGUI's success helped demonstrate that MOTCL are not always right (some may say never, but that's another story), so after we shipped it we decided to take the next step and listen to more customer feedback about how to continue improving the usability of our products. And, that's how our Remote Administration Server (RAS) functionality came to be.

RAS lets us take full advantage of the graphical user interface and at the same time adapts our products to fit in all possible environments, even those that do not have a graphical environment for some reason. It gives end users the ability to manage Symlabs LDAP Proxy and Symlabs Virtual Directory Server configurations regardless of where they are installed, and also allows them to deal with several instances at the same time. So, if an environment has six different instances of Symlabs LDAP Proxy running, let's say four in the local data center and two in different parts of the country, RAS allows them all to be managed from one place.

Think of RAS as a "connector" between the core engine I described earlier and the DSGUI graphical configuration utility. It works as a daemon process running on the server along with the core engine, communicating between any instance of the core engine in Symlabs LDAP Proxy or Symlabs Virtual Directory Server, and any instance of DSGUI.

OK, so that's a bit about where RAS came from and basically what it is. Next time, I'll finish this discussion with a more in-depth explanation of how to actually use RAS and DSGUI to simplify configuration and management chores in a complex environment. Meanwhile, I'll refer to my earlier comment and recommend that you fill some spare time with Neal Sthephenson's book "Cryptonomicon", which should be mandatory reading for anyone working in the security and identity management field.

Fernando García Vegas

We're on still target to meet our general availability date, which will be very soon now, and more important than that we're on target to deliver all the benefits that this new release was designed to offer. We're getting good feedback which is telling us that the performance improvements are going to be as dramatic in real-world implementations as we predicted they would be. Speaking as the Product Manager and also one of the developers, this is the best news we could get, since every small percentage increase in the speed and throughput of such communications-intensive processes is a prize we fight very hard to win. But, as our customers insist, this is a championship caliber prize because it's the key to making their whole infrastructure responsive - and to them that means customer satisfaction, efficient operation, and fewer problems overall.

Not to diminish the importance of usability by putting it last, but version 4.0 also gives Symlabs Virtual Directory Server and Symlabs LDAP Proxy an improved user interface to make them much nicer, meaning faster and easier to configure into working applications, plus a powerful new feature to centralize administration of multiple instances on different servers. I'll write more on that later, but already I can see that we are getting very good reports on this added usability. And, since this means we're giving our colleagues in the IT department a shiny new set of tools, that makes me feel pretty good, too.

Fernando García Vegas

First of all, what do we mean by performance? It's obviously about being fast, and it's also about being scalable. Fast usually means that you want responses to your queries as quickly as possible. Scalable means that you want the system to be powerful enough to handle hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of operations per second without flinching. Ideally, the virtual directory should be faster than the actual directory infrastructure. We typically use two metrics: the time that it takes to handle a request, and the number of requests that can be handled per second.

Before I dive any further into this, I must point out one very important factor. Virtual directories are virtual front-ends to existing identity infrastructure. Often, virtual directories are deployed as front-ends to other LDAP servers. When a request is made to the virtual directory, the virtual directory will turn around and query the actual back-end identity store (LDAP directory, database or other type of data store). So, when we are talking about the time required to handle a request, we must be more specific: do we mean the total time for the request to be handled end-to-end? Or, do we mean just the time that is needed by the virtual directory?

The same thing is true when discussing the number of operations per second. If a virtual directory is the front-end for a LDAP server that can only handle 500 requests per second, then that is the maximum that you are going to get, regardless of what the virtual directory by itself can do. Therefore, by definition the virtual directory is very much dependent on the back-end infrastructure. Of course there are some ways to overcome this - either by load-balancing between multiple replicas or by caching. But, I won't go there - at least not today.

So, if the virtual directory is influenced so much by the performance of the back-ends, how do we take meaningful measurements? We typically run our products in idealized environments where the back-ends are not an issue. For example, instead of running our Virtual Directory Server against a "real" LDAP directory server, we run it against another version of Virtual Directory Server that acts as a "dummy LDAP server" - it responds to each query with a pre-configured reply that is always the same - but it does so very quickly. This allows us to see what the maximum values are for our products. So, can you get this type of performance in your deployment? Yes - if your back-ends can keep up. Or, if you configure Virtual Directory Server to load-balance or cache data, to help them out when they can't.

In ideal environments, Virtual Directory Server can handle many thousands of packets per second. Your mileage can vary, of course, depending on the speed of your CPUs, your network, and how fast your operating system can dispatch packets to and from Virtual Directory Server. We've even noticed some differences in the internal network stacks of certain operating systems, and some are definitely more optimized than others, so they will run Virtual Directory Server faster on the same CPU. This is because the underlying operating system has a better optimized TCP/IP stack in some cases, and can therefore shuffle packets faster.

So, why should you care? First of all, think of Virtual Directory Server as the front-door to your identity data. Applications make requests to Virtual Directory Server, and it acts as a virtual data switch. You obviously want to have as much flexibility here as possible, so that you can "grow" as needed. But there's an additional upside to having a scalable product. Unlike some of our competitors, who use a heavyweight architecture and therefore rely on caching results (because re-calculating them on the fly would just be too slow), we have none of these restrictions. We’ve designed our software from the ground up for performance and massive scalability without having to rely on caching. This gives you more flexibility and imposes fewer restrictions.

I hope this discussion is helpful to you. I also plan to write something soon that will examine in a little more detail what makes us so unique when it comes to performance and scalability.

Several years ago, Gerry Gebel from the Burton group authored an excellent article on virtual directories, introducing the technology and giving an overview of the companies that were in the field. Since we were one of the pioneers of virtual directory technology, I've had the honor to brief him on our product. He was so kind as to send me the report after it was published, and ever since the Burton Group has been updating the report regularly. What I found very important to note was that Gerry didn't think meta-directories were dead and announce “long live virtual directories”. Instead, he saw the technologies as complimentary.

Gerry was completely right back then, but nowadays meta-directories are just about dead anyway. Let me explain why ... meta-directories use a synchronization approach. They work by propagating changes from multiple places into one place, and then optionally pushing those changes out again to other sources. So it's all about synchronization. Virtual directories, on the other hand work, by pulling data “on the fly” and transposing it “on the fly”.

Virtual directory technology has been around for about five years, and innovative companies like Vodafone and Boeing that saw the light right away were among the earliest adopters. Virtual directory may not be fully mainstream today, but it's a well respected technology, and its advantages and disadvantages relative to the good old (but slightly rusty) meta-directory approach are now well known. So why are meta-directories just about dead? It's because virtual directories have moved on. Nowadays, virtual directory servers such as our Virtual Directory Server include the functionality for synchronization as well, so that users can do the same tasks with a virtual directory that previously only meta-directories could do.

It's all about having the right tools for the right job. Virtualization is an exciting technology that promises very easy integration without the “yet another”  factor (having to create “yet another directory” to copy into). Virtual directories are non-intrusive and can typically be deployed in a fraction of the time that it takes to deploy a meta-directory. Synchronization, on the other hand, is a tool that has advantages in the few cases where virtualization is lacking - such as when data really does need to be copied, or if a data source cannot be relied upon to be permanently available.

So, as virtual directories such as Symlabs Virtual Directory Server take on more and more synchronization features, I can't think of a reason why anyone would want a pure meta-directory any more. Except for those very smart guys who grew up with meta-directory technology, but unfortunately think of virtualization being a "threat" to their good old technology. Move on guys! The future lies with virtual directories, or rather virtual meta-directories - engines that handle both virtualization and synchronization to the benefit of companies and their integrators that deploy them.

I, on the other hand, will fence it out with our competitors in the Virtual Directory arena on Wednesday the 9th at 14:00. The title of our panel discussion is "Loosely Coupling Applications through Identity Information - The Future Role of Virtual Directories" and it will be moderated by Martin Kuppinger, one of the founders of Kuppinger Cole who are sponsoring the conference. We'll be discussing virtual directory technology and we'll answer all those pressing questions I know you have - why this is so much better than the old meta-directory approach, and what the future holds for directory integration. Afterwards, I'll be speaking about how to deploy a bullet-proof, highly available directory service. That presentation is going to be no-nonsense, hands-on, and full of information that I've gathered over the last five years (and which you can't find anywhere else).

I highly recommend that you try to attend this conference, and if you do, make sure you drop by and say hi! We're going to be exhibiting the latest versions of our LDAP Proxy, Virtual Directory Server, and Federated Identity Suite at booth G1 in the exhibition area. See you in Munich!