Easing the path for organizations to launch big data-styled services, Red Hat has coupled the 10gen MongoDB data store to its new identity management package for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution.
"The beauty of Identity Management is that it has a central infrastructure that companies can use to manage identities across many different types of applications," said Kelly Stirman, 10gen director of product marketing. With MongoDB linked to Identity Management, those shops already using RHEL will find it much easier to set up and run applications that run on MongoDB data.
Although it already has been fairly easy to set up a copy of MongoDB on RHEL -- by using Red Hat's package installation tools -- the new integration minimizes a lot of work of initializing new user and administrator accounts in the data store software.
Being connected to Red Hat Identity Management, MongoDB can use the user IDs and group permissions that are already managed within Identity Management, helping the organization to establish a SSO (single sign on) infrastructure for its employees and contractors.
"Most companies will want to manage identities centrally. No one wants to provision users and passwords on an application by application basis. It's too much work and doesn't have the security enforcement that organizations want," Stirman said.
Stirman noted that a lot of test deployment of MongoDB happens on Microsoft Windows machines, and this new integration could pave the way for more production use of MongoDB on Linux data center servers.
Red Hat added Identity Management into RHEL 6.4 to provide organizations with a way to centrally manage employee credentials and authentication, explained Ellen Newlands, Red Hat senor security product manager.
It provides Linux infrastructure with many, though not yet, all of the features of Microsoft Active Directory, which supplies identity management services for Microsoft Windows. Like Active Directory, Red Hat's Identity Management uses the LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) to provide directory services and user authentication; it is built on the open source FreeIPA identity management software.
Since its launch in 2009, the open source MongoDB has been downloaded more than 4 million times, according to 10gen. Intuit, Craigslist, MTV, and Foursquare, among other companies, have used the document database for duties such as archiving, content management, real time analytics and social media.
