A South Asia Provider of 2G and 3G Mobile Services
A mobile communications provider puts DNS caching closer to its customer base for better Internet response times.
The Customer
The customer is a large south Asia national operator of mobile 2G and 3G voice and data services, and has more than 100 million subscribers. It ranks among the top country operators in the world and manages traffic of more than a billion minutes every day.
The Challenge
The mobile operator’s DNS infrastructure needed a significant upgrade in order to cope with the growth in subscriber DNS traffic. The legacy system, consisting of open-source BIND software on multiple Sun servers, would have to be upgraded to support high DNS traffic growth and to provide better performance, centralized management, and reporting visibility. But the incumbent DNS caching vendor was unable to offer reporting capabilities without moving customer data offshore—infringing national data security and privacy regulations.
The Infoblox Solution
Infoblox deployed nine large carrier-grade appliances across three cities as DNS caching servers, with centralized management via the Infoblox Grid. Infoblox Trinzic Reporting was also deployed, enabling all reporting to be done in-country from a single central location. The Infoblox reporting solution includes in-depth reporting on DNS conditions for each server on the network, as well as aggregated, network-wide reports on DNS traffic levels and trends.
The Infoblox Grid provides centralized management visibility from a single graphical user interface (GUI) while also automating many routine manual administrative tasks. This frees up key technical staff for more strategic functions and improves overall operational efficiency.
Local Infoblox support staff developed a close working relationship with the customer, ensuring that the solution would be supported locally and cost-effectively over the long term.
The Results
Now the mobile operator has system-wide DNS capacity planning and reporting from a central location, and expects to see considerable improvements in scalability—without adding labor resources. The DNS servers have enough spare capacity to cope with future traffic growth, and if that capacity is exceeded, new appliances can be added without adding significant operational staffing to support them.
Overall, operational costs have been reduced by eliminating the extensive manual support by skilled technical staff that the legacy solution required, and the company’s DNS experts are free to concentrate on more strategic tasks. In addition, manual configuration errors have been eliminated.
For more information, please contact your Infoblox representative or visit www.infoblox.com