Prominent Social Media Company
The Customer
This customer is a social media company that facilitates communications between retail businesses and large groups of people. Since the company’s product exists only on the Internet, core network services like Domain Name System (DNS) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) are paramount.
The Challenge
Most Infoblox customer stories start with a discussion of the legacy solution we replaced. This customer went directly to a commercial-grade solution. “We had a lot of knowledge of generic and open-source platforms,” says the company’s senior director of information security and network engineering. “We had also seen a demo of Infoblox solutions. We were pretty sold with everything we saw.”
“As a new company that is moving at light speed,” he says, “we didn’t do a bake off as a larger enterprise might have done. We made our decision based on the prior experience of our staff in delivering core network services, and our knowledge that months and months of effort go into developing in-house systems to provide the missing pieces that don’t come along with generic servers and freeware.”
Rather than hire another senior-level network engineer and systems administrator to come in and try and use an open-source product to build out an anycast network that could be deployed globally, the IT team chose to take advantage of the capabilities Infoblox had demonstrated to them. “It was the quick way to get visibility into the network, deploy on a sound technology with an anycast back end, and get redundancy in the bargain—rather than go down the path of trying to custom build everything ourselves,” the director says.
The Infoblox Solution
With consulting from Infoblox Professional Services, the company’s IT staff was able to migrate all its services over to Infoblox in a month, without disrupting end users. The solution included Infoblox Grid™ technology for central management and high availability, Infoblox DDI for core network services, and Infoblox NetMRI for automation.
The Results
Instead of the struggle with cumbersome tools and the time spent developing scripts that characterize the initial forays of many companies into core network services management, the social media company enjoyed from the outset the benefits of central management, an easy-to-use interface, and automation. Functions that could have taken months were accomplished in days.
“Our biggest ROI,” says the senior director, “has come from the simple fact that we didn’t have to grow our staff to build out the core services. The second one has come from using NetMRI to manage those devices.”
He also mentions the value to a growing organization of having backup capability in case of a disaster, which has already proven itself when a flooded floor of the building destroyed 15 access-layer switches in the room below. “We were able to replace those the next day and have them up and running in 10 minutes because we had the configurations backed up.”
The company is still growing, and the Infoblox solution will grow with it. “We’re opening offices on a regular basis,” the senior director says, “and our plan is to utilize the Infoblox product stack to replace core infrastructure services at each of these new offices.”