Verisign Offers Single Hybrid Managed DNS Service

Verisign, Inc., has rolled out a single managed Domain Name System (DNS), combining unicast and anycast query routing methods in a unique cloud-based service. The Verisign Managed DNS optimizes the availability and performance of Web services, e-mail and websites and offers a hybrid approach to domain name server queries and responses.

The cloud-based, hybrid approach to managed DNS relieves organizations of the cost and burden of maintaining their own DNS infrastructure, enabling them to focus on their core service offerings. The hybrid DNS approach minimizes transactional latency and optimizes availability by anycasting to a smaller number of name servers within a specified zone. The service simultaneously unicasts to remaining services, enabling a flexible, multimode approach.

"Before today, organizations generally had to rely on one approach or the other for DNS resolution -- a reality that forced companies to make trade-offs between performance and availability," said Ben Petro, senior vice president of Verisign's Network Intelligence and Availability business. "By deploying a hybrid of unicast and anycast technologies at 17 of our authoritative name server locations, Verisign is empowering organizations to easily and flexibly manage their DNS environments based on their own tolerances for risk."

Organizations gain more options for routing traffic based on their own availability and transaction performance requirements. Multiple discrete physical nodes provide operational redundancy, and Verisign can distribute query loads to improve availability and reliability. The unicast method enables a single client to communicate with a single server, and is considered ideal for high availability situations. The anycast method uses mirrored servers to represent a common IP address, which can minimize transaction latency.

The market for managed DNS services is growing, and a 2010 survey of end users from Merill Research showed that of the 58 percent of respondents currently managing their own DNS servers, 28 percent are interested in outsourcing DNS management.

"A hybrid DNS query infrastructure offers enormous advantages for both availability and performance, yet for most organizations, maintaining such a system would be prohibitively expensive and complicated," said Jennifer Pigg, vice president at Yankee Group (News - Alert). "Our research shows that enterprises are not willing to compromise either availability or performance, but can't afford to build and maintain an on-premise DNS solution and are pursuing managed DNS services."

Verisign is offering a special services package through April 30, comprising its suite of network intelligence and availability products. The package features DNS hosting, DDoS protection and threat intelligence.