A North American Mobile and Wireline Service Provider

Customer

The customer is a North American integrated provider of mobile and wireline services—including mobile voice, data, and broadband Internet services—to consumers, businesses, and government agencies.

Challenge

The parent group was consolidating operating companies and needed to merge various disparate IT systems—including its DNS and DHCP systems. Two separate Alcatel-Lucent VitalQIP systems were in use to manage DNS for multiple wireline networks and for multiple Microsoft and BIND DNS systems on the mobile network. The overall combination of disparate DNS systems left the provider with no synergies across the company and no common solution for IP address management.

Change management was a major challenge, since methods and procedures were different on each of the legacy networks. Day-to-day operating processes like server OS patches, security updates, and software upgrades were different in each organization—and all were manual and error-prone, involving multiple operations teams, organizations, and server platforms for internal and web-facing DNS as well as for DHCP.

The service provider decided to use the reorganization as an opportunity to rationalize its DNS systems and bring in a more consistent and coordinated approach, with the goal of achieving operational efficiencies, cost savings, and performance improvements that would benefit users.

Solution

In order to replace the highly distributed architecture across multiple entities, the operator consolidated its DNS systems into three regional data centers and tuned the architecture to reduce DNS latency while eliminating remote DNS servers in twelve regions. By adopting Infoblox appliances, the operator was able to eliminate the many hardware and software integration issues and to eliminate the need for multiple server OS and security patches. Infoblox helped the IT team to adopt a total of more than 50 Infoblox appliances and a best-practices design approach, including:

• High-availability pairs of appliances at every location
• Dedicated client DHCP and DNS resolvers in each datacenter
• Dedicated DNS resolvers for network devices and servers in each datacenter
• Dedicated resolvers in DMZs for network devices and systems within protected security zones in each datacenter

Results

By automating many manual administrative tasks with the Infoblox Grid™, the operator considerably reduced operational support cost, accelerated change control and made it more consistent, and retired legacy server hardware. A single DNS administrator now runs the entire Infoblox system, where five administrators were required before. Customers are also experiencing better Internet response times due to reduced DNS latency, and the operator is able to plan better by using the Infoblox Reporting Server, which provides centralized, system-wide performance overviews as well as in-depth detailed troubleshooting views.