InformationWeek

January 11, 1999

Extreme Computing, Directory Servers, and Security (Welcome to 1999)

By Jason Levitt

t's the beginning of the new year, time to count our blessings and, here at the Internet Zone, think about those who are less fortunate than us--those living on the fringe--the folks who fight to keep their network and computing infrastructure going from day to day, and who are saddled with staggering projections of more users, greater transactions, and additional computing cycles. I'd like to say that I coined the phrase "extreme computing," but it has been part of industry vernacular for some time. (It usually refers to high-performance computing involving supercomputers and parallel processing, or perhaps Unix systems running on big iron.)

The explosion in business-to-consumer electronic commerce, along with better Web tools and Internet connectivity, is fueling the current crop of extreme computing sites--Amazon.com, Hotmail, Dell Computer, and other sites that deal with millions of users and transactions per day. They rarely can use canned, off-the-shelf software, and their computing infrastructures have to be designed to scale quickly and with minimal downtime.

We're going to be hearing a lot more about extreme computing this year, as more sites start to deal with these huge numbers of users and transactions. We'll also see more off-the-shelf software that will claim to handle the load.

The 411 Of Computing
My favorite extreme computing niche of the moment is directory services. Driven by E-commerce but also motivated by system administrator overload and security concerns, the need for universal directory services is clear, and the big players are preparing to launch their products this year. Combined with the use of digital certificates and a public key infrastructure for certificate verification, directory services will offer the possibility of single sign-on in the enterprise and manageable sign-on for large pools of users on the Internet and extranets (I've written about this stuff before, see www.informationweek.com/698/98olkey.htm).

To make these work, though, you'll need directory servers that can not only securely store digital certificates, but can also handle a large number of Lightweight Directory Access Protocol transactions per second, and scale to millions of users. Of course, if you're on a company intranet, you'll also probably want to store other things in your directory server entry--for example, application preferences, so that whatever desktop you're using can be configured to its usual state. A database store, fast transactions, and virtually unlimited user scalability--if ever there was a case for extreme computing, directory servers are it.

Reality Bytes
Directory server software with PKI hooks will arrive this year, but whether anyone will trust it remains to be seen. Despite the progress of firewall and network security architectures, there is still a great deal of justified cynicism about security at the operating system level. Recent research papers, such as "The Inevitability of Failure: The Flawed Assumption of Security in Modern Computing Environments," pretty much dispose of any notion that simply adding security controls on top of existing operating systems will actually create a secure environment.

Market-driven cynics may simply say that no system is secure and continue onward, but the paper's central theme--that current mainstream operating systems do not contain the basic mechanisms for enforceable security--is well-argued. (I'm hoping that most folks will ignore this paper and that my apocalyptic prediction two years ago will come true.)

Is there an easy solution to these problems? Of course not. But we can always hope that the year 2000 will bring--oh, never mind. Happy new year!

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