Chapter 11. Replication Design

• Why Replicate?

• Replication Concepts

• Advanced Replication Features

• Designing Your Directory Replication System

• Replication Design Checklist

• Further Reading

• Looking Ahead

Directories play a pivotal role in your organization's computing infrastructure. The services they provide are so crucial that downtime of your directory due to equipment failure probably cannot be tolerated. If your directory data is available from only a single server and that server fails or becomes unreachable, your users will have trouble getting their work done.

Directory replication protects you from this unfortunate situation by making your directory data available on multiple servers. It also improves performance by allowing you to make more copies of your directory data available and place them close to the users and applications that use them.

In this chapter, first we discuss some important replication concepts. Then we examine some related issues, such as replication scheduling and how schema and access control interact with replication. Finally, we explain how you should design a replication solution for your directory environment.

Replication, topology, and namespace design are all closely related. If you have not read Chapter 9, Namespace Design, and Chapter 10, Topology Design, we suggest you do so before attempting to design your replication. Having a good understanding of all these topics will enhance your ability to build a reliable, scalable directory.