LDAP Directory Technology Review

Multi-management systems in the Internet Services industry particularly in the Web Hosting Industry are widely used, as they provide task automation and improve the services and the technology available for customer websites. Several systems are competing in this market for the functionality offered to the end-users.

With the recent population boom on the Internet, the need for efficient solutions which can provide websites with all the necessary elements of success, irrespectively of the business model of a particular company. Network resources need to be wisely managed in order to ensure the smooth operation of the services provided to the customers.

The main objective of this report is to prove the concept that the proposed system can be delivered using an OpenLDAP Directory Server backend storing application and network services configuration data and a management application layer to provide the necessary functionality to the end-users.

The management solutions currently available on the market have relatively high licensing costs and tend to be specifically developed for managing the various aspects of a server, without providing any “business oriented” functionality even though they are addressed specifically to the web hosting industry. This results in web hosting providers requiring additional software in order to manage the accounts, payments, orders and other business operational information.

Developing such solution using Open-Source and other free software would ultimately reduce the company’s operating costs, while at the same time continue to be able to provide highly competitive services to the customers and thus it is one of the key objectives of this report.

Experience gained by providing such services using various such software vendors over the past seven years, has indicated various problems which usually start to appear as the number of websites hosted on a single server increases and by the addition of a popular website to the customers base. A more flexible solution is required in order to improve network performance without compromising the functionality available to the end-users.

The purpose of this project is to additionally explore whether traditional Information System development methods and techniques can be used in the context of a multi-management system which can manage the network services and provide the functionality offered by similar solutions on the market.

The decision to explore Directory Server technology as the backend of the proposed system was primarily based on the schema flexibility, the inherited nature and from the fact that key players in the computing industry have adopted the technology and have released custom implementations incorporating features and functionality available in traditional Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS).