For COMDEX Intranet--Novell Connecting Points (NCP), Gary Norton, Novell Corporate Events systems engineer, was responsible for designing the most consistent and stable structures possible for Novell Directory Services (NDS) and GroupWise 5.2. To that end, Norton tested several structures based on the premise that the NDS tree and the GroupWise 5.2 system should parallel one another.
With this goal in mind, Norton began designing the NDS tree. Along with the [Root] object (named Novell_Planets) and the Novell Organization object, this NDS tree contained several Organizational Unit (OU) objects: Applications, GroupWise, Printers, Servers, Users, and Virus. These names were based on the type of NDS objects that each OU object held. In addition, a BrainTrust OU object held User objects that had been granted unique rights, including the User objects for Novell Corporate Events systems engineers.
The NDS tree held three OU objects for users: Users_00-32, Users_33-66, and Users_67-99. Each of these OU objects held an additional 12 OU objects, which, in turn, held User objects. Thus, a total of 36 OU objects in the NDS tree held User objects. Because Norton planned to store 7,500 User objects in each of these OU objects, the NDS tree could support up to 270,000 User objects.
As Norton designed the NDS tree, he simultaneously designed the GroupWise 5.2 system. Norton divided this system into nine domains: two primary domains, one domain for GroupWise 5.2 gateways, and six domains for users. (See Figure 1.)
Each of the user domains held six GroupWise 5.2 post offices, for a total of 36 post offices. These post offices corresponded to the 36 OU objects in the NDS tree, and Norton planned to create 7,500 accounts in each post office. As a result, the GroupWise 5.2 system could support as many as 270,000 accounts.
The GroupWise 5.2 post offices for COMDEX Intranet--NCP were extremely large--far larger than a corporate network should run. However, when Novell Corporate Events systems engineers design NCPs, they "have a tendency to break rules," Norton admits.
The rules Norton is referring to are the written and unwritten guidelines for designing corporate networks, but NCPs are not ordinary corporate networks. For example, at COMDEX, 250,000 users shared fewer than 300 NCP workstations. As a result, no more than 300 users could tax NCP's processing power at any given time. And because these users had only five days to accumulate e-mail messages, the users could not consume enough disk space to slow NCP's performance. In short, large GroupWise 5.2 post offices were justifiable exceptions for an exceptional system.