Neustar, Infoblox team on cloud service

In another sign that DNS operations are migrating into the cloud, industry leader Neustar will announce on Tuesday a new managed service that allows companies to outsource all of their internal DNS and related network address management functions that run on Infoblox appliances.

In another sign that DNS operations are migrating into the cloud, industry leader Neustar will announce on Tuesday a new managed service that allows companies to outsource all of their internal DNS and related network address management functions that run on Infoblox appliances.

Will security worries propel DNS into the cloud?

Neustar's new service -- dubbed Ultra DDI -- allows network managers to offload their entire DNS, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and IP Address Management (IPAM) operations while retaining control over day-to-day changes for their corporate networks. Until now, Neustar has offered a global network infrastructure for handling a Web site's external DNS queries, rather than managing internal DNS functions.

The new Ultra DDI service is the result of a partnership between Neustar and Infoblox that was announced nine months ago.

The Ultra DDI service includes Infoblox appliances and related hardware and software upgrades as well as around-the-clock monitoring and maintenance of DNS, DHCP and IPAM operations.

"We are offering a full managed service, where the customer does not have to worry about anything related to DNS, DHCP or IP Address Management. We do everything for them," says Partha Teerdhala, senior director of product management at Neustar. "We install the infrastructure, we monitor the infrastructure, we manage the infrastructure, and if there's a problem, we take care of it."

Teerdhala says small and medium-sized businesses will be interested in the new Ultra DDI service because their DNS-related operations are getting more complex, due to the emergence of new protocols such as DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC)  and IPv6, the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol.

"Internationalization, IPv6, Voice over IP, DNSSEC and mobile devices are making it harder for enterprises to manage DNS, DHCP and IP addresses," Teerdhala says. "The complexity is going to be multiplied in the next couple of years. The infrastructure they have has to scale up, become more complex, and at the same time it has to be in operation 24-by-7. The knowledge base they need to have is going to be hard to find."

Teerdhala adds that he believes companies will be interested in hiring one company to manage both their internal and external DNS operations. "We've proven ourselves to be a great external provider as far as DNS is concerned. Now we're bringing that expertise to the internal operations," he says.

The Neustar announcement follows on the heels of a similar integrated offering from rival Afilias, which has teamed up with appliance vendor BlueCat Networks. Called Proteus Cloud Services, this BlueCat offering allows network managers to control their internal and external DNS services through a single BlueCat interface.

Read more about data center in Network World's Data Center section.

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Tags cloud computinginternetData Centerhardware systemsinfobloxCloud serviceConfiguration / maintenanceLAN & WAN

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