Most Competitive
aeSLAPD offers a fresh approach to directory pricing. Least total cost of ownership (TCO), period.
Zero stored-user charges for all academic and most commercial users, with nominal charges only for very large directories. Compare this to Sun JavaSystem Directory. Our rates are lowest industry wide for per-user entry Right To Use (RTU).

A "directory" is a virtual concept, meaning it really may be composed of one or more servers in a tree/peer/hub model. aeSLAPD server classes (Office, Institutional, Enterprise) determine the maximum concurrent connections a single server can support.

AE provides free Right-to-Copy (RTC) up to the number of servers your scale of directory requires. Unlike web servers where pages are explicitly addressed via a URL, at the heart of directories is a database search-engine. For massive directories that cannot be fully cached into memory, the disk access/read times and operating system overhead will limit the size of a database that can be searched on one machine in a tolerable amount of time. In other words, to maintain acceptable levels of response, large directories are replicated (to better manager network volume), and/or divided and logically connected via referrals to reduce the physical size of each database. Either approach means multiple server copies will be needed for scalability.

The hidden cost with other vendors is that they force customers to purchase separately for each server in the directory, which is inevitable to support large directories.

Server Concurrent User Capacity Typical 
# Entries		 RTC Description
Office 50 < 1000 0 No RTC, performance reduced if greater than 1000 entries at max usage.
Institutional 100 < 10K 1-7 RTC based on estimated 5 copies needed to adequately service 500,000 user DIT. 
Enterprise 250 > 10K 1-200 Same as above. RTC based on estimated copies needed to adequately service up to a 50 million user DIT. Ask for pricing scales.

Advantages
 aeSLAPD has many advantages which make it highly competitive to better penetrate the burgeoning LDAP market, among them are:

  • lowest total cost of ownership
  • lowest base prices
  • highest stored-user ceiling before per-entry RTU charges are applied
  • lowest per-entry RTU rates in the industry, ask for scales)
  • free RTC (right-to-copy for scalable directories based on size
  • LDAP v3 and v2 compliant
  • truly lightweight, native LDAP – most competitors still merely LDAP gateways to X.500
  • smallest "footprint" for required hardware
  • runs as either an NT service or Win32 process
  • WWW user front-end and native Windows Directory Management tool
  • low cost of administration – U. Mich SLAPD configuration compliant; the most widely used, openly documented LDAP server.

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