Request for NDS Statistics from Customer Sites

Dear Colleague,

Novell Systems Research is performing a study of NetWare Directory
Services (NDS) implementations and we invite you to participate. You can
help by filling out a site survey and running SCANTREE.EXE, a read-only
tree walker utility that characterizes the design of your NDS tree.

The purpose of this study is to accumulate enough data about customers' trees
of all sizes so that we can statistically describe trees being used in production
networks. This data will benefit the design of NDS benchmarks and the
formulation of rules of thumb for NDS tree design and optimization.

The results of this ongoing research project will first be featured at Novell's
BrainShare conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, during the week of March 18-22,
1996, in the following breakout session:
  Using Real-World NDS Tree Characteristics to Design Optimal Trees
  This session details the results of a study of customer trees including
  the total number of objects, attributes and replicas, and their average
  sizes. These results, combined with in-house benchmark data, are
  helpful in various aspects of tree design. The speaker will provide you
  with an analysis of this critical data to help you make tree design and
  optimization decisions. 

Each participant in this study will receive a copy of the presentation notes.
Details, such as company and participant names, will be kept confidential.

If you choose to participate, you need to download the SCANTREE utility and
survey as instructed in the accompanying AppNote, and then return your
completed survey and a SCANTREE log file to the address below. Although
this an ongoing study, only submissions postmarked or e-mailed before
January 31, 1996 will be included in the BrainShare presentation. Your
questions and comments are also welcome.

Thank you,

Ron Lee
Senior Research Engineer
Novell Systems Research
122 E. 1700 S. 
Provo, Utah 84606
E-mail: rlee@novell.com
Phone: 801-429-7555