The company adds features to a service most ISPs take for granted and some regard as a chore.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [January 22, 2008]

UltraDNS was founded in 1998 and acquired by NeuStar in 2006. The company's former CEO, Ben Petro, is now senior vice president of NeuStar Ultra Services. Petro says that NeuStar Ultra Services's goal is simple: to deliver a robust, scalable DNS infrastructure for the enterprise.

Dynamic DNS allows large companies to route traffic to the best server, which is usually the server that's nearest geographically and has the lowest load. "If they did it themselves," he says, "they would have to scale physically and across all geographies. We're in tier 1 peering facilities such as Equinix or with the government (in India, China, South Africa, and others). We have 7,500 enterprise customers."

Now the company is offering DNS Advantage to ISPs. It's an outsourced DNS resolver but it also offers more. For example, if your customer's primary site goes down, DNS Advantage can immediately force a switchover to the secondary site. Most DNS servers would experience a delay as the new DNS address propogated.

Furthermore, the company claims its DNS Advantage is easier to administrate than the competition, reducing help desk calls and increasing profitability.

In the news
NeuStar Ultra Services' DNS Shield was in the news in 2006 when innovative anti-spam outfit BlueFrog was taken out by pill spammers. BlueFrog's anti-DDoS provider was Prolexic, which used UltraDNS. "Prolexic was a customer of our," admits Petro, "but they were not allowed to sell the service, certainly not under that guise."

The issue, of course, is that no system can be guaranteed to be DDoS-proof—though it can be built well. "Nobody can claim to be DDoS-proof," says Petro. "No network is more resilient or more capable that ours. Last year we were hit by a flood of 11 Gbps, which is 2 million queries per second per server and we were able to . . . stay up. Our servers are as heavyweight as you can buy. They are quad Ethernet, with multiple peering paths. We run at 7 percent of total available bandwidth, and the remaining 93 percent is overhead. You can imagine that if you're managing over 7,000 different companies, as we are, we're under a DDoS attack 24/7/365."

Key to the resilience is the ability to interact positively with ISPs. "We have the ability to say to ISPs, 'police your borders or we'll cut you off,' not abrasively—we work together. We get the ISPs to help."

The trends, says Petro, don't look good. "We would never say we're DDoS-proof. There could always be a perfect storm. The trends are bigger botnets and it's no longer kids running them. The botnets are well funded. We guarantee our customers five nines availability. That's the telecom standard for uptime and we've never violated it."

Pricing and availability
DNS Advantage is available now. It is free

Pricing for DNS Shield depends on bandwidth used, but Petro says that an ISP with 15,000 to 30,000 residential customers would pay about $1,000 per month for the service.

—End