Oracle Unified Directory – Stepping Forward
Back on July 20th, Oracle officially announced Oracle Unified Directory 11g, although it had “unofficially” been available for download for quite some time before that date.  I was part of the Oracle Security Sales Consulting team who received training on this new product the week of July 11th, the week before the official launch.
As a former Sun Microsystems employee, it is gratifying to see Oracle leverage the excellent innovation in the OpenDS project into a full-fledged strategic product. Now, from its humble origins OUD has emerged as the “Next-Generation Unified Directory Solution that Integrates Storage, Synchronization and Proxy.” Â Some key highlights include:
- Next Generation: builds on the success and wide adoption of Oracle’s existing directory services solutions with five years of continuous and innovative development to address the increasing demands on modern directory servers;
- High Volume Writes: utilizes social and location-based services to increase the frequency of changes to identity data, as well as expanding the contents to include more details, including location, images, and relationships;
- Elastic Scalability and Extreme Performance: provides a global index and data distribution capabilities to deliver unmatched elastic horizontal scalability and offers high-scale authentication performance to serve an unparalleled billions of users, subscribers and devices;
- On-premise and Cloud Computing Capabilities: controls the synchronization and virtualization of the data to make data available to cloud-based applications and systems while protecting data privacy and data jurisdiction across organizational and state boundaries;
- Smaller footprint: makes Oracle Unified Directory simple to embed and easy to deploy and manage;
- Integrated: interoperates with all components of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g and Oracle Directory Services Plus Suite, while still providing standards support for application integration and scalable data management in heterogeneous environments. Additionally, it also integrates with Oracle Enterprise Manager for monitoring and Oracle Directory Services Manager for configuration.
By the way, I couldn’t find an OUG-specific graphic to use in this post. Â Sun Microsystems was a bit more fun in that regard!