IT Week: As Nominum’s chief scientist, do you think enterprises need dedicated appliances to run Domain Name System (DNS) and other critical network services if they are moving voice and data onto an IP network?
Paul Mockapetris: It depends on the size of the enterprise. There are a lot of small firms that run DNS and DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) services on a server that’s doing other things as well. Moving these services to a dedicated appliance can work well, but firms should be prepared to invest in two appliances for redundancy. Today, the challenge is that people want something that’s easy to configure, and they want something that they can customise for new uses.
How would you describe Nominum’s business?
We provide network naming and addressing software that can run on different hardware and software platforms. Some firms come to us and say, “We want it to run on a Sun platform,” or “We want it to run on an Opteron,” and we can cater for that. Rather than provide a one-size-fits-all solution, we can adapt to users who have standardised on a specific platform. Our customers are often very large enterprises, telcos and carries such as BT that have millions of users. The performance and reliability requirements at the high end of the market mean that you’re dealing with more than just one machine. Some of these guys have hundreds of machines dedicated to these services.
Is DNS service traffic increasing?
We’ve been seeing traffic in some of the large networks doubling every six months. It wasn’t always that way, it’s just the new [Web 2.0] applications.
How are people using these new applications?
If, for example, they’re downloading a movie over the internet, only one DNS lookup may be needed. In this case, DNS performance is not that important, the crucial thing is bandwidth. But if you go to one of these social networking sites, all of a sudden you may need to do hundreds of DNS lookups to pull together all the tiny pieces [of information kept on dispersed systems] that are needed to create the web page. Here bandwidth isn’t critical, you need better DNS performance to do all the lookups. Another thing is personal data-mining apps. For instance, I could have a system that knows my GPS co-ordinates and knows that I like pizza. So it looks for pizza special offers within 500 yards of where I’m standing or similar things like pubs serving my favourite beer. In the future, the cell phone will increasingly be seen as a marketing vehicle for the carriers.
About Paul Mockapetris
Mockapetris is chief scientist and chairman of Nominum.
He created the Domain Name System (DNS) in the 1980s at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute.
