Infoblox DNS Module Delivers Industry-standard Name Services

Flexible Deployment: The Infoblox DNS module can be configured to support any role, including authoritative (primary), secondary, forwarding, and caching—all with high performance.

Reliable DNS Service: If DNS services are not available, the entire network is down. Therefore, this service must be available nonstop. bloxHA technology allows two appliances to be combined into an HA pair for reliable DNS service. If the active appliance fails, the passive appliance takes over and continues to provide DNS service in less than five seconds, without any loss or duplication of data. In addition, the unique combination of the DNS protocol engine and the bloxSDB database enables many changes—such as adding records to a zone—to occur without restarting services. This eliminates many of the service interruptions that occur when updating data in conventional BIND-based DNS servers.

Anycast: In order to achieve a globally distributed, highly-resilient DNS infrastructure, companies can use the Anycast feature to “advertise” a single IP address for DNS services that are served by multiple physical devices. The IP address is advertised via the OSPF routing protocol and is withdrawn from the routing table when DNS is not available. This provides global load distribution and automatically routes queries away from appliances that are out of service.

Real-time Updates:Dynamic DNS (DDNS) updates are replicated in real-time to all DNS servers in an Infoblox grid. No other DNS server available today provides real-time replication of DDNS updates. This is essential for network environments that require accurate DNS data for security reasons or for locating devices—like printers—on the network by a simple name.

GSS-TSIG:Dynamic DNS (DDNS) updates from Microsoft clients can be signed using GSS-TSIG with the client’s Active Directory credentials. The Infoblox DNS server accepts GSS-TSIG-signed DDNS updates and verifies the credentials against the credentials stored in Active Directory. This enables users to offload DNS from Microsoft Windows servers without compromising security. Infoblox offers the only appliance solution that supports GSS-TSIG.

Dual Stack IPv6 and IPv4 Support: The Infoblox DNS server provides support for native IPv6 and IPv4. IPv6 support includes both forward zone (AAAA) IPv6 DNS records and the ip6.arpa IPv6 DNS reverse zone. The DNS server with IPv6 networking support allows administrators to configure IPv6 addresses for Zone Transfers and Query Access Lists and will respond to both queries and zone transfers on the IPv6 address.

Single Graphical Application to Manage DNS Data and Services: The administration of DNS data can be securely delegated to administrators based on appliance, zone, and resource record type.

Zone Locking: Prevents administrative change collisions and enables multiple administrators to work simultaneously without causing unexpected or unpredictable results. When a zone is locked by an administrator, other administrators are prevented from making changes to that zone until it is unlocked. Unlike systems that can only lock on a global basis, the Infoblox zone Locking feature provides granular control and can lock at a zone level.

Hostname Templates: Administrators can enforce naming conventions by defining hostname templates that are applied on a grid, appliance, or zone basis. Administrators can also easily run reports to find and fix legacy records that don’t conform to a selected template.

Name Server Templates:This powerful feature enables administrators to propagate changes automatically to multiple zones on multiple appliances. For example, in a system with 500 zones that are served on 50 appliances, changing the IP address of a name server which is secondary for all zones—an operation that would require 25,000 changes with a conventional system—can be done with a single operation.

AVAILABILITY AND SOFTWARE PAckAGES

The DNS module is available in the software packages illustrated in the following chart: