“Because it takes far less time to administer a single cluster than six independent servers, our total cost of ownership is lower.”
—Tomas Soderlund, Network System Administrator, Sodertorn University College
Located in a multicultural suburb of south Stockholm, Sweden, Sodertorn University College, which currently counts more than 13,000 among its students, teaching staff and administration, has expanded rapidly since its founding in 1996. The University College offers Bachelor and Master’s degrees across a wide range of academic programs covering the humanities, social sciences, technology, education, and life sciences.
The network plays a crucial role in the day-to-day functions of the school, such general business, administrative and financial activities as well as academic research and curriculum. In order for the school to operate effectively, the network must function at all times. Essential to availability of the network and all its applications are domain name resolution (DNS) and IP address assignment (DHCP) services—without these operating non-stop, nothing can be accessed.
Since its inception, the University College had relied on Microsoft Windows-based servers to support DNS and dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) functions. Over time the network grew in size and complexity. Six Windows-based servers were required to support DNS and DHCP for both data and a growing Voice over IP (VoIP) application. Those servers were becoming increasingly difficult to manage. This was particularly true for setting up and managing the scopes, or range/subnet of TCP/IP addresses provided by each of the six servers.
Management largely fell on the shoulders of Tomas Soderlund, the University’s network systems administrator, who noted that, “Reliability of the old DNS and DHCP servers was adequate, but they were cumbersome and difficult to manage and the overall solution was not very user friendly.”
After attending a seminar on DNS best practices, Soderlund learned about the advantages of an appliance-based approach and considered replacing the old servers to save significant administrative cycles that could be applied elsewhere.
Soderlund commented, “This was the first solution we had seen that merged the functionality of DNS and DHCP while packaging it as an appliance rather than software running on a general purpose server.”
The possibility of replacing all six existing servers with just two appliances appealed to Soderlund who was taxed with responsibility for maintaining the servers and all other network applications for the University.
However, to be viable, the appliances had to meet several requirements. “Our policy is to maintain a fault tolerant environment,” said Soderlund. “Any new solution would have to provide high availability. And, based on our experiences over the past ten years, we know things can change very fast. We needed a solution that could scale. Finally, it had to be easy to manage.”
After a short evaluation, Sodertorn University College selected and deployed Infoblox-1000 appliances running the DNSone package to deliver nonstop DNS, DHCP and IP address management (IPAM) services. Considering the limited IT resources available to manage the network, the appliance-based Infoblox solution was the ideal choice.
The Infoblox devices are deployed in a fault-tolerant, high-availability configuration to ensure resiliency and nonstop delivery of external DNS and internal IP address assignment services. One serves as an authoritative device and the other as a back-up. In the unlikely event of a failure ofthe authoritative device, the back-up device takes over, ensuring seamless operation.
Infoblox appliances are designed to provide the foundation for next-generation network identity services. The hardened appliance design and intuitive GUI enable the offloading of network identity services, such as DNS, DHCP and RADIUS, from general-purpose servers that lack reliability and scalability, require significant management overhead for patching and upgrading,and often introduce security vulnerabilities.
Instead, these services can be easily managed by a purpose-built, hardened appliance that is inherently secure, reliable and scalable, freeing network administration resources and providing increased security. Additionally, the Infoblox appliances can be deployed stand-alone or in high availability pairs to ensure nonstop operation, and can be optionally linked into robust, distributed ID grids for unparalleled core network service availability and management benefits.
The Infoblox solution was easy to deploy and is simple to upgrade because it eliminates the need to install and manage an operating system and offers an intuitive GUI. Further, the purpose built appliance approach has inherent security benefits and increases reliability with high availability functionality.
Soderlund concluded: “Keeping all of the old separate servers up to date was time consuming. Because it takes far less time to administer a single cluster than six independent servers, our total cost of ownership is lower. All the information is in one place, which is much easier to handle.”
The Customer: Leading Swedish University
Application: DNS and DHCP solution
Challenges: Required simplified management, high availability, and scalability
Solution: 2 Infoblox-1000 appliances running the DNSone package for:
