Network naming and addressing technologies provider Nominum (nominum.com) offers organizations "always-on" DNS, enabling them to host large numbers of resource records and support many DNS zones.

"DNS technology has been, for the longest time, something that was in the closet and very easy to run," says Albert Gouyet, VP of marketing for Nominum. "What has happened in the last two years is the influence of the DNS has grown as the Internet has grown with more and more complex traffic that's pushing the boundaries of solutions out there."

Nominum Foundation ANS offers high DNS scalability and performance to organizations that rely heavily on the DNS, such as TLD and other DNS registries and registrars, DNS hosting providers, large enterprises and service providers with strict service-level obligations.

The company recently implemented an authoritative name server for APNIC (apnic.net), the regional Internet registry for the Asia Pacific. The non-profit, membership-based organization provides allocation and registration services that support the global operation of the Internet, including ISP, national Internet registries, and similar organizations.

"APNIC was using an open source solution that up to now worked fine," says Gouyet. "I'm not saying that the open source doesn't work. The open source works fine and a lot of people use it, but it was never designed for a large carrier or enterprise environment."

In fact, Nominum itself has had its share of developing open source software, including ISC-DHCP v.3, and BIND v.9, which is the most commonly used DNS server today.

APNIC chose Nominum's ANS server primarily for its ability to delivers high performance in terms of query responses per second, and it can be configured and managed remotely without the need for downtime.

Requiring significant levels of ANS performance, reliability and functionality, APNIC researched several solutions to find a solution that could manage the reverse IP-address to host-name mapping for the entire Asia Pacific region.

Additionally, the organization needed a solution that had high throughput and operational stability for both IPv6 and IPv4, as well as supported DNS security extensions. The solution needed to be able to make zone alterations in real time and reconfigure servers without enduring long server restart times, since APNIC's servers are located in the busy Internet exchanges of Japan and Australia.

In less than two weeks, Nominum provided the organization with a tested, field-ready solution. Since implementation, APNIC's CPU load on the organization's busiest server dropped by almost 70 percent, while the DNS server process start time now clocks in at under 30 seconds.

The ANS solution successfully met APNIC's scalability, availability and industry standard support requirements, enabling it to provide high-quality Internet resource management services to APNIC members.

As the Internet continues to escalate in activity, DNS will only increase in importance, positioning Nominum as a significant player in the industry, says Gouyet.

"The DNS is growing way faster in terms of traffic than lots of other trends on the network," says Gouyet. "This is compounded by the fact that now your phone, your PDA, tomorrow, your phone -- are all DNS clients as well."