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Do It Yourself DNS

Posted by Joe Hernick and Dean Ellerton on March 31, 2003

Tags: Data Center Infrastructure,  Data Networking & Management,  HASH,  Hardware and Infrastructure,  Infrastructure,  Internet Access,  Network Hardware,  Network Management and Monitoring,  Networking,  Networks,  Other,  Software,  Software and Web Development,  Traffic Management,  WAN Optimization and Application Acceleration

Channel: Networking & Mgmt, Other, WAN & App Acceleration

We graded each product on ease of setup, overall usability, error-checking capabilities and security features. The results: BlueCat's Adonis won our Editor's Choice award by a whisker. Its superior security and overall usability put it on top, though ApplianSys' DNSBox300 was hot on its heels.

Dishing Up DNS

Managing and maintaining DNS for any size shop can be a challenge. While small companies rely on their ISPs to provide DNS, most companies rely on internal resources running some variant of Unix or Microsoft. Let's face it: If your DNS goes down, you lose touch with the outside world, customers included.

Acknowledging the importance of healthy DNS configurations, the conventional approach requires someone with high-level administrative skills and understanding of your network's topology, so highly compensated individuals wind up devoting a large portion of their time to designing, setting up, maintaining and troubleshooting DNS. The approach works, but the consequence is that DNS often ends up being a large, hidden expense in the IT budget.

So here's our answer to the question of why you need a DNS appliance: All three of the products we tested help manage those hidden expenses by greatly reducing the effort required on the setup, care and feeding side of the equation, freeing up those big-dollar folks to focus on higher-level issues. The goal of these appliances is to make DNS easier to live with. And after extensive testing, we believe that, if your budget allows, these boxes are a worthwhile investment.