F5 Enhances Suite Of DNS Services With Added Scalability And Security

Complete DNS solution improves overall performance and reduces costs for enterprise customers

F5 Networks, Inc., the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, recently announced dynamic services to help organizations intelligently respond to DNS queries and application requests, consolidate infrastructure, and provide end-to-end protection for their essential DNS systems. With F5, customers can reduce internal and in-network response latency by up to 80 percent, seamlessly scale their systems up to 10x as demand grows, and provide advanced DNS security for physical, virtual, and cloud environments.

F5 BIG-IP solutions are ideally positioned to intelligently manage and distribute DNS and application requests based on business policies, access demands, and network conditions—yielding an optimized and reliable experience for users as well as IT personnel. With today’s announcement, F5 is introducing new capabilities—including DNS caching and resolving, DNSSEC validation, monitoring, and other performance enhancements—building on previously announced solutions for Communications Service Providers and DNSSEC signing.

“As applications and DNS infrastructures have become more complex to address security and performance concerns, organizations are finding it impossible to scale and efficiently manage their systems,” said Jason Needham, VP, Core and Traffic Management, F5 Networks. “With F5, customers enjoy a complete global DNS and application delivery solution with the intelligence to enhance the security, performance, and availability of their essential DNS services.”

Details
With the growing complexity of online applications, the volume of total DNS queries has reportedly doubled in the last five years, and a modern website may require more than 100 DNS name resolutions in order to render the full page. This increase in requests has led to slower page load times and generally hindered application availability for users.

IT teams have typically sought to address DNS performance and scaling concerns by simply adding more DNS servers, outsourcing DNS functions, or deploying a variety of point products in their internal infrastructures designed to optimize performance. However, all of these approaches have proven to be costly and inefficient.

F5’s dynamic DNS services enable customers to:

• Easily Optimize, Scale, and Control DNS Infrastructures F5’s BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager product seamlessly scales DNS capabilities up to 10x as an authoritative DNS server, dramatically increasing query response rates for maximum uptime. Additionally, F5’s powerful DNS iRules technology provides organizations with customizable control over how specific DNS requests are handled—giving customers the ability to focus on their most critical needs.
• Provide End-to-End Protection for Crucial DNS Systems Only F5 solutions provide comprehensive protection for DNS and applications with built in safeguards to handle extremely high volumes of DNS requests—up to 10x more than without F5—and shield systems from threats like DDoS attacks. Customers enjoy the full DNSSEC solution, including both real-time DNSSEC signing for authoritative server responses and high performance DNSSEC client validation for end-to-end protection.
• Deliver an Enhanced, Reliable User Experience F5 enables faster web browsing by reducing the effects of latency up to 80 percent with DNS caching and resolving functions—helping internal and in-network visitors quickly find what they’re looking for and resulting in a more seamless experience for both users and administrators.

With the added efficiency F5 solutions provide, IT teams can significantly reduce the number of DNS servers required to support their systems, consolidating deployments and cutting costs. And because F5’s DNS services are easily deployed with BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager, they can be combined with other BIG-IP products to further enhance the security and performance of applications.

Supporting Quotes
“A high-performance DNSSEC validation solution is going to be extremely important as more and more sites deploy DNSSEC,” said Cricket Liu, VP of Architecture at Infoblox.

“These enhanced DNS capabilities provide strong complements to F5’s BIG-IP offerings, and make the company’s technology even more attractive to our customers,” said James Hagen, Lead Security Architect at RKON Technologies. “With F5, enterprises can easily deploy and manage DNS and application delivery services in concert—in corporate data centers or the cloud—and maximize the value of their IT investments without sacrificing security or performance.”

“DNS services are a primary reason we went with F5 for our infrastructure,” said Oktay Yavuz Bora, Senior Network Engineer at Turk Telekom. “With BIG-IP products, we were able to deploy leading functionality with an exceptional reduction in latency from the new DNS caching and resolving capabilities.”

Availability
F5’s DNS services and the company’s other technologies described in this announcement are available now with BIG-IP version 11.2 software.

About F5 Networks
F5 Networks, Inc., the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), helps the world’s largest enterprises and service providers realize the full value of virtualization, cloud computing, and on-demand IT. F5 solutions help integrate disparate technologies to provide greater control of the infrastructure, improve application delivery and data management, and give users seamless, secure, and accelerated access to applications from their corporate desktops and smart devices. An open architectural framework enables F5 customers to apply business policies at “strategic points of control” across the IT infrastructure and into the public cloud. F5 products give customers the agility they need to align IT with changing business conditions, deploy scalable solutions on demand, and manage mobile access to data and services. Enterprises, service and cloud providers, and leading online companies worldwide rely on F5 to optimize their IT investments and drive business forward. For more information, visit www.f5.com.

SOURCE: F5 Networks