DNS - UltraDNS and Innovation in DNS Technology

Innovation in Domain Name System, or “DNS” – the technology that works in the background to connect computers to Web sites through IP addresses – has seen startling innovation in recent years, and must continue to evolve in order to route Web traffic effectively, an expert in the field told TMCnet in an interview.

 

According to Rodney Joffe, senior vice president and senior technologist at Neustar – a Sterling, Va.-based company that delivers addressing, interoperability, and infrastructure services worldwide to communication service providers, enterprises, associations, governments and regulatory agencies – cornerstones of DNS such as having multiple servers around the world with the same IP address have served the Internet-using world well.

 

Joffe – inventor of Neustar’s industry-leading “UltraDNS” offering – told TMCnet during a podcast that’s available here, in The DNS Zone, that developments in areas such as traffic management also have seen rapid innovation.

 

“One of the things I really wanted to have in place was the ability to give a different answer depending on any of a number of variables,” Joffe said. “So, for example, if the load was really high in one data center let’s say for Web servers, I wanted to be able to give a different IP address in the DNS answer so that use would go to different data center. There was no taxonomy in the existing implementation to allow for that. So we really had to design this from the ground up.”

 

And so he did – the UltraDNS product includes fundamental requirements that its predecessors didn’t have. It took about 10 years to build and now serves thousands of customers, including several Fortune 500 companies.

 

During our conversation, Joffe discussed what fueled the development of UltraDNS and discussed special considerations that Neustar made for security, such as DNS Shield, whereby nodes are provided to the largest sources of queries (major ISPs), so that people can query from their recursive servers directly to Neustar’s authoritative servers.

 

“It means that there’s no path that an attacker can actually take to get to those authoritative servers or to poison the recursive servers, so it’s very effective,” he said.

 

Visit Neustar’s DNS global online community to hear the interview in full.