There are many challenges that are faced when an organization is forced to run a mixed protocol environment to serve up the same data. This introduces additional management tasks and additional complexities. In a mixed protocol environment you must manage Windows Access Control Lists (ACL) to enforce Windows permissions in addition to managing *nix user/group ids with permission bits to control access. The EMC Isilon solution is a great platform to support mixed protocol environments. In my opinion this far, the Isilon platform is the ideal solution to deal with a mixed protocol environment due to it’s integration with authentication services such as Windows Active Directory or any LDAP service. There are a number of products that provide extensions to Windows Active Directory to provide UID/GID authentication and mappings. One of those products is Quest’s (Vintela) Authentication Services.

Quest Authentication Services uses five fields in the Windows Active Directory. These are the five attributes that Quest Authentication Services uses:

• gecos
• uidNumber
• gidNumber
• loginShell
• unixHomeDirectory

Using that information, we are now able to integrate the Quest (Vintela) Authentication Services with the EMC Isilon NAS Storage. The screenshot below displays the correct settings to use on the EMC Isilon storage to integrate with Quest Authentication Services.

Finally, test your mappings to ensure your AD/LDAP authentication and mappings work correctly.