Global Directory Services, such as DNS (BIND) and GDS (X.500), grew out of the computer industry's need to reference objects in distributed networks across an entire enterprise and worldwide.
With the deployment of networks, applications needed explicit addresses to access network resources. At first, these resource addresses were built into applications. As networks became larger and the volume of resources increased, the addresses were stored in local databases, which increasingly became harder to manage and more difficult to use. Later, the addresses were moved into shared databases on servers. As networks were joined together, these resources needed global names: the same name always refers to the same object regardless of where it resides or where it is used in the distributed system. Global directory services were developed to act as registries that assign a unique global name to the enterprise and its objects and list these global names in a directory so applications could perform name lookup or search functions on network resources.
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