Using Replication For Local Availability; Using Replication For Load Balancing - Netscape DIRECTORY SERVER 7.0 - DEPLOYMENT Deployment Manual

Defining a Replication Strategy

Using Replication for Local Availability

Your need to replicate for local availability is determined by the quality of your
network as well as the activities of your site. In addition, you should carefully
consider the nature of the data contained in your directory and the consequences
to your enterprise in the event that the data becomes temporarily unavailable. The
more mission-critical the data, the less tolerant you can be of outages caused by
poor network connections.
You should use replication for local availability for the following reasons:
• You need a local master copy of the data.
This is an important strategy for large, multinational enterprises that need to
maintain directory information of interest only to the employees in a specific
country. Having a local master copy of the data is also important to any
enterprise where interoffice politics dictate that data be controlled at a
divisional or organizational level.
• You are using unreliable or intermittently available network connections.
Intermittent network connections can occur if you are using unreliable
WANs, as often occurs in international networks.
• Your networks periodically experience extremely heavy loads that may cause
the performance of your directory to be severely reduced.
Among other reasons, performance is affected in enterprises with aging
networks, which may experience these conditions during normal business
hours.

Using Replication for Load Balancing

Replication can balance the load on your Directory Servers in several ways:
• By spreading your user's search activities across several servers.
• By dedicating servers to read-only activities (writes occur only on the supplier
server).
• By dedicating special servers to specific tasks, such as supporting mail server
activities.
124 Netscape Directory Server Deployment Guide • October 2004