What’s Active About Active Directory?

In response to Marc Erickson’s The Power of Active Directory Provisioning in yesterday’s IT Professionals, Gnomie Kevin Sweeney writes:

In reality, most corporations cannot deploy Active Directory across the environment for one reason: it only runs on Windows 2000/2003 server. Most corporations run a mixed environment of NetWare (yes, still alive and well), Linux, Unix (Solaris/HP-UX/AIX), as well as Windows. Novell eDirectory (formally NDS) has been around longer than AD (NDS since 1994), and supports all previous mentioned platforms. The power of AD is like a slight breeze compared to hurricane force winds of eDirectory. eDirectory is more flexible (supports LDAP v3, XML, SOAP, DSML) and powerful (scales to more than one billion identities) and with easier disaster recovery than AD. I believe people should be careful calling Microsoft’s Active Directory (what’s active about it?) powerful as they may not have used or heard of Novell’s eDirectory.