Compliance, NAC, VoIP & Others Require Next-Generation Network Infrastructure
By Stuart Bailey, FOUNDER AND CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER - INFOBLOX

Chances are your IT team has placed priority on planning and deploying advanced applications like VoIP and NAC. Daily operation of these applications, among others, depends on critical network services, including domain name resolution (DNS), IP address assignment/management (DHCP/IPAM), user authentication (RADIUS), and file transfer (FTP).

Using conventional solutions that are based on OSes to deliver these network services can compromise availability and security of the advanced applications your team has spent so much time and money implementing.

Further, as the number of IP-based devices continues to skyrocket, the stress on these network identity systems and those who manage them will only increase. At the same time, the rate of change of network identity data - for example, the continuous changes in IP addresses as users roam with mobile devices - requires highly dynamic systems that can cope with rapid change without errors or data loss.

As a result, ensuring local survivability and simplifying management of network identity services, like DNS and DHCP, while ensuring related data integrity, is becoming a top IT priority.

Next-Generation Approach Scales for the Future

First-generation network identity appliances have addressed the basic management, security, and reliability challenges by delivering network identity services in dedicated devices with easy-to-use administrative interfaces and features such as built-in high-availability. This is the same model that network administrators have applied to routers, firewalls and storage.

Infoblox next-generation appliances not only deliver nonstop DNS, DHCP, IPAM, RADIUS and other key services to address standard reliability and management challenges, they can be deployed in an ID grid and share a common, distributed, built-in database that integrates and correlates all data objects, including IP addresses, host names, devices addresses, firmware images, etc., to provide unprecedented enterprise-wide, service delivery, real-time management and scalability advantages.

Changes to the data that occur on any appliance are reflected across the grid, securely, in real-time and with full transactional integrity. This prevents data loss, eliminates inconsistencies and errors, and ensures that usage reports, address assignments, and network access decisions are based on accurate data. Because they do not require a separate, external database for device configurations and reporting data, ID grids provide inherent reliability advantages, data integrity, faster and easier disaster recovery, and are easier to manage compared with other approaches.

If your organization depends on 24x7 availability of its key applications don't take a chance on leveraging sub-par legacy network identity infrastructure solutions. Learn more about the Infoblox approach and ID grids by visiting www.infoblox.com or call your Akibia account manager.