“With more than 9,000 employees on our network, we realized our DNS infrastructure needed redundancy and automatic failover. DNS is a critical piece of network infrastructure and merits adedicated appliance approach.”
—Marciene Ingram, Network Communications Security & Internet Team Lead, Hennepin County Operations
Founded in 1852, Hennepin County has the largest constituency of Minnesota’s seven counties, with almost a quarter of the state’s population. With Minneapolis as its largest city, Hennepin County has a broad-based economy with strong trade, service and manufacturing sectors.
Hennepin County has more than 9,000 employees, two data centers, nine campus buildings and more than 30 remote sites. Their current data centers are within six blocks of each other; however, within the next two to four years, one of them will be moved across the county.
After a DNS caching incident that caused outages across their infrastructure, Hennepin County decided to evaluate DNS alternatives to their previous Meta IP and Microsoft-based solutions.
“The outages were a real wake-up call and forced us to examine our network services infrastructure,” said Marciene Ingram, Network Communications Security & Internet Team Lead, Hennepin County Operations. “There were some fundamental issues with our current DNS solutions, including the fact that the BIND software was not up to date, making our systems vulnerable to attacks. We also needed a solution with both primary and secondary high availability, something our current system did not offer.”
The County’s current solution required constant patching which was too cumbersome for their limited IT staff. Additionally, the County was dissatisfied with their general-purpose server and software approach, which could not accommodate their web-based and download applications that are dependent on DNS.
Working closely with their reseller, Applied Communications, the County evaluated several solutions including Infoblox. Given the County’s impending move, need for scalability, administration ease and increased security, they selected the Infoblox purpose-built, appliance-based solution with a hardened operating system and easy-one button upgrades.
They selected and deployed eight Infoblox-1000 appliances running the DNSone package forexternal and internal DNS.
“Hennepin County chose Infoblox because it simplifies administration, improves security, and offered an easy migration path for existing data,” said Marciene. “Additionally, one of the biggest reasons was that it has a web-based management console. We really like the ability to easily update and manage the devices.”
The benefits to the County were immediate. The installation of the Infoblox appliances has almost eliminated the time and cycles required by IT staff to support the boxes and they have been able to perform DNS upgrades in minutes. The unique product features, including HA capabilities, central management and grid technology have made the transition to the Infoblox appliances seamless and painless. In the future the County will be looking to Infoblox for IP address management (IPAM) capabilities.
Largest county in Minnesota, housing one quarter of the state’s population
DNS solution
Simplify administration, improve security and scalability
8 Infoblox-1000 appliances running the DNSone package for:
