California University Office of the President Scores Top Grades with Infoblox Network Identity Appliances

January 10, 2006; 06:46 AM

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Jan. 9, 2006 — Infoblox Inc., a developer of essential infrastructure for identity-driven networks (IDNs), today announced that the University of California Office of the President (UCoP), the system-wide headquarters for the University of California school system, has selected and deployed Infoblox network identity appliances to improve the reliability and reduce the management complexity of its network identity infrastructure.          

The UCoP oversees the academic mission, budget, community affairs, and business and financial activities; supports 10 campuses and three lab facilities; and processes more than 100,000 admissions applications each year. 

Providing 24x7 access to the internal network and the Internet for the information necessary to serve its more than 120,000 faculty and administration representatives and to process applications is essential to the operation of the entire school system. 

The UCoP previously used general-purpose servers and operating systems with open source software to perform internal and external domain name resolution (DNS) and dynamic host configuration (DHCP) services.  After experiencing reliability and management issues with the previous solution, the UCoP IT department determined that a new solution was required to help reduce the administrative burden and improve overall system reliability.  After an extensive evaluation, UCoP selected an appliance-based solution from Infoblox.  Since selecting and deploying the Infoblox solution, the UCoP IT team has realized significant administrative and management advantages, saving IT resources and increasing system reliability.

Gilbert Loo, manager of Windows System Engineering for the UCoP IT team, commented:  “With the old system, we were never on the latest version of BIND, but with Infoblox there is a simple one-button upgrade process that allows us to make sure we are up to date and protected against specific vulnerabilities without requiring network downtime.  This alone has helped dramatically reduce our administrative overhead and increase network availability.” 

The UCoP purchased 6 Infoblox appliances with the DNSone module to perform internal and external DNS and DHCP services.  Four devices are deployed as high-availability pairs in the UCoP data center in Oakland, Calif., to facilitate domain name services supporting all applications for back-end administrative applications.  The appliances also provide domain name services for all the .com, .org and .edu zones associated with the UCoP.  A fifth appliance is deployed in the UCoP lab where the team is testing dynamic DNS functionality, DHCP capabilities and integration with Microsoft Active Directory.  The sixth is deployed in a disaster recovery location.

Infoblox appliances are designed to provide the foundation for next-generation network identity services.  The hardened appliance design and intuitive GUI enable the offloading of network identity services, such as DNS, DHCP and IPAM, from general-purpose servers that lack reliability and scalability, require significant management overhead for patching and upgrading, and often introduce security vulnerabilities.  With Infoblox, these services can be easily managed by purpose-built, hardened appliances that are inherently secure, reliable and scalable, freeing network administration resources and providing increased security. 

For more information about DNSone and other Infoblox products, visit:

http://www.infoblox.com/products/dnsone.cfm.

About Infoblox

Infoblox develops essential infrastructure used for establishing identity-driven networks (IDNs).  Infoblox network identity appliances deliver nonstop DNS, DHCP, IPAM, RADIUS and related services with unparalleled reliability, manageability, scalability and security.  Hundreds of organizations worldwide, including many of the Fortune 500, use Infoblox solutions for the critical naming, authentication, authorization and IP management services that make their networks secure, robust, manageable and compliant. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA and operates in more than 30 countries.  For more information, call +1.408.716.4300, email info@infoblox.com, or visit www.infoblox.com.