BlueCat and Afilias offer DNS as a Service

• SearchCloudComputing.com Staff
• Published: 04 Aug 2010

Tired of managing your DNS servers? Pay someone else to!
Canadian IP address management (IPAM) specialists BlueCat Networks are marrying their real-world domain name system (DNS) appliances to international domain name registry services provider Afilias. Afilias can do things like help you get a top-level domain (TLD) if you're an ISP, for instance, or make sure your external DNS servers have global coverage.

John Kane, vice president of corporate services for Afilias, said the pitch is simple: BlueCat and Afilias can, for a fee, remove DNS management and security tasks entirely, so that smaller organizations can get protection from distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks and larger ones can trade in-house management and updates for a simple fee.

"We fully support DNSSEC as well," said Kane, and companies looking to transition to IPv6 will also find the Proteus service ready for that as well. So what are the downsides to DNS in the cloud? It costs money, for starters, and managing your own DNS servers internally was so much fun already. Why would anyone give it up?

IBM cloud continues to grow
IBM has opened another cloud computing center, this time in Poland, that it can add to its ever increasing fleet of strategically located data centers and projects involving cloud computing. The new initiative is located at Wroclaw University of Technology, and seems to boil down to an IBM-powered computing platform and a drive to encourage CS students to learn Tivoli, IBM's automation framework.

It joins an earlier project by IBM, announced in Wroclaw, to build an IBM "service delivery" data center. Apparently the hope is a steady stream of new Polish Tivoli experts to feed the new IBM infrastructure and continue IBM's long term plans to dominate the cloud.