MetroFi

“Infoblox appliances give us the flexibility and agility to deploy our networks on schedule.”

—John Reilly, Network Engineer, MetroFi

The Customer

MetroFi is a leading provider of free wireless Internet access, municipal services, and Internet advertising. MetroFi has signed agreements with cities across the United States to design, build, and operate free municipal Wi-Fi networks for residents, visitors, and city workers. Among the cities MetroFi serves are Concord, Cupertino, Foster City, San Jose, Santa Clara, and Sunnyvale, California as well as Aurora, Illinois and Portland, Oregon. MetroFi is able to provide free 1 Mbps downstream and 256 k upstream access in these communities through online advertising supported by local and national advertisers.

While the service is provided at no cost to users, reliability and availability are still very important. Domain name resolution (DNS) and IP address assignment (DHCP) services play an important role in availability, as well as management of the network. Each wireless access point,for example, requires an IP address, facilitated by DHCP, for internal management.

The Challenge

Expanding the footprint of free wireless “hot zones” from a coffee shop to an entire city was a new and untested business model. MetroFi pushed ahead, building out networks in several cities. “In our prototype design—a home-grown solution—we used standard, off-the-shelf servers and software to support DNS and DHCP functions,” said John Reilly, network engineer at MetroFi. “Once we shifted into production mode, we began looking for a scalable solution thatwould allow us to rapidly deploy networks in other cities. We didn’t think that our current DNS implementation could scale to thousands of requests per second.”

In addition to scalability, the new DNS/DHCP solution would also need to be highly reliable and redundant, easy to install, and easy to maintain. This seemed like a tall order, but then MetroFi learned of the Infoblox appliance-based solution. “Appliance-based implies that it’s purpose-built, hardened, reliable, and thoroughly tested—features that would be costly and time-consuming to achieve on our own,” commented Reilly.

The Solution

MetroFi liked what it saw in Infoblox and decided to install two Infoblox-1050 appliances in its new Portland network. The two devices run the DNSone package, which can support 150,000 database objects and serve over 24,000 DNS requests per second, making it the most powerful DNS and DHCP appliance in its class.

MetroFi deployed the Infoblox devices as a fault-tolerant, high-availability (HA) pair to ensure resiliency and nonstop delivery of external DNS and internal IP address assignment services. One serves as an authoritative device and the other as a back-up. In the unlikely event of a failure ofthe authoritative device, the back-up device takes over, ensuring seamless operation.

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

The Result

The Portland wireless network went live in early December 2006 with over 70 access points covering much of the downtown area. The network will be expanded over the next two years to cover 95 percent of the city. The Infoblox appliances have performed flawlessly with no downtime to date.

“They were easy to install and they’re much easier to provision than dhcpd.conf or BIND,” saidReilly. MetroFi realized another benefit of Infoblox appliances. “The interface is much more intuitive. There’s no command line interface (CLI) to learn, which reduces the learning curve as well as the odds of the NOC operator making a mistake that could bring down the network.”

MetroFi will utilize Infoblox appliances in all new network deployments and will replace general purpose servers and software with Infoblox appliances in its existing networks. Currently, citywide networks are managed remotely from a number of regional Network Interconnect Facilities or NIFs. Eventually, MetroFi will construct an administrative virtual private network (VPN) backbone to interconnect all of these NIFs. With that backbone network in place, the Infoblox appliances can be linked into robust, distributed grids for unparalleled core network service availability and centralized management.

MetroFi has an aggressive growth plan in place with new citywide networks coming on line on a regular basis. At least for DNS and DHCP functionality, the wireless service provider can rest easy. “Infoblox appliances give us the flexibility and agility to deploy our networks on schedule,”concluded Reilly.