SRT Communications

The Customer

SRT Communications, located in Minot, North Dakota, is the state’s largest telephone cooperative. SRT has served the telecommunications needs of north central North Dakota since 1951, employs more than 200 people, and serves more than 50,000 customers.

SRT maintains a fiber-optic, copper, and wireless distribution-and-access network to provide essential and advanced communications. As a leader in deploying enhanced telecommunications services, SRT provides broadband and dial-up Internet services, wireless service, and cable TV as well as traditional telephone, leased line, frame-relay, voice mail, and long-distance services. The company also provides infrastructure to ISPs.

The Challenge

According to Al Zahursky, IT manager at SRT, the company was using an open-source product for DNS services, and wanted to hand some of the system administration responsibility off to the operations team. This would require assigning access based on roles and also demand an interface and infrastructure that would be easy for operations staff to use.

The Solution

The IT team explored several available products, but the easy-to-use graphical interface of the Infoblox solution and its provisions for role-based delegation of access to limited parts of the network—coupled with the familiarity SRT has gained as a five-year Infoblox customer—made the choice easy.

The Results

The operations team is now able to help with network management, and the system administrator no longer needs to make changes or to support operations. Roles are clearly defined, and response times have improved. And since Infoblox software can run on virtual appliances, there was no need to purchase new hardware.

According to Zahursky, “The cutover to the new system was so seamless that no one felt the changes, and the support we’ve gotten from Infoblox has been great.” He also mentions more visibility on the corporate side and improved performance as benefits. “All in all,” he says, “the solution works well, and SRT is very happy with it.”

SRT has recently added Infoblox DNS Firewall to its corporate environment, and the next step will be to focus on IPv6 management. Zahursky expects Infoblox IPAM—with its ability to reduce the sheer amount of high-risk manual work by replacing spreadsheets with automated IP address management—to help with that.