VeriSign: Give Us Your DNS

Looking to add to its dominance as a domain registrar, VeriSign Monday took the wraps of a series of services it hopes will satisfy even the most finicky systems administrator.

by Michael Singer of siliconvalley.internet.com [August 27, 2002]

The Mountain View, Calif.-based VeriSign said its Managed DNS Services suite has expanded to include complete outsourcing, in-house control and a combo package that lets the domain administrator roll their own.

VeriSign said its new services should help avoid the dreaded "Page Not Found" or"DNS Error" when users go to a website.

Managed DNS Services director Ed Choi says that his services separate the world into two halves.

"From a hosting perspective, we see the world as public and private," said Choi. "Some of our customers tell us that they need us to take care of their domain management. They don't want to edit at the command line, while others want to do it themselves. What impresses me most is how easy we can make it for both worlds."

The new software suite comes a week after its controversial call for a waiting list service was passed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), despite objections raised earlier by one of its advisory organizations.

VeriSign said its new software suite includes tools, redundancy, and physical dispersion necessary to maintain 100 percent uptime and streamline the management of the domain name system (DNS) infrastructure that supports e-mail, e-commerce, or other Web applications.

The effects of even temporary DNS downtime can be widespread. A recent study by research group Men & Mice found that of 5,000 .com domain names tested, 73 percent had incorrect DNS configurations and 38 percent allowed for a single point-of-failure. The resulting downtime can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue, lost productivity, decreased customer satisfaction, and IT labor. For example, the Yankee Group estimates that companies lose $100,000 on average in productivity alone for an hour of network downtime.

The problem for some of the more public companies is that they have to take what Choi calls a "surgical strike" because out of 1,000 domain names licensed, a company may only activate 100 but still have to maintain the remaining 900 as well.

"Take for example Disney, which has the rights to Disney.kr (the Korean country suffix)," said Choi. "They may decide later on that they want to expand their online presence there. With our tools, you can actually track traffic at the DNS level, which would let them know how much interest there is in those sites."

The package is divided into three plans, DNS Hosting, DNS and IP Enterprise, and DNS High-Availability. Hosting is the outsourcing service that lets VeriSign manage the company's worldwide primary and secondary name server network, with a secure Web-based interface to quickly and easily manage DNS data. Pricing for the Hosting package is based on number of zones and number of domain names.

The DNS and IP Enterprise package is a software and an appliance solution that lets the company simplify in-house DNS and IP address management with simple point-and-click, graphical user interfaces, automation for commonly used tasks and reporting templates. The products can be "plugged into" VeriSign's high-availability service. The software goes for $2,500 for the primary domain and covers 250 hosts IP addresses. Secondary domains are gauged per host somewhere between $0.50 cents and $2.50 above the 250 host level and is also based on the size of your network.

For those who want to have both types, VeriSign's DNS High-Availability service allows a firm to keep its primary domain management in-house while directly integrating into VeriSign's global secondary name server network. The hybrid starts at $25 per zone per year and pricing goes up for add-ons.

VeriSign said it is aided by VeriSign's ATLAS (Advanced Transaction Look-up And Signaling system, which it recently acquired) to accommodate upwards of 100 billion DNS lookups per day.

"Today's e-business would not work without DNS, which means that companies must create a comprehensive DNS management strategy," said Aberdeen Group senior analyst Michael Hoch. "Because it manages and guarantees the largest domain name registry in the world, VeriSign is fully equipped to help firms develop, deploy, and manage their company's domain name environments—both in front of and behind the corporate firewall."

The other advantage that VeriSign claims is that the suite avoids BIND-based systems, which have public security flaws, in favor of Microsoft-based systems.

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