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Men&Mice Suite IPAM and DNS with xDNS Redundancy™: security without complexity

Dynamic IP infrastructure challenges require dynamic DNS management.

Aug 22nd, 2018

As we increased focus on cloud optimization, DNS redundancy, and compatibility across hybrid and multi-cloud networks in our latest Men&Mice Suite v9.1 release, we also went to great lengths to ensure visibility and ease-of-use across IP address management as a means of increasing network security.

Dynamic IP infrastructure challenges require dynamic DNS management

IP address management in general, and creating DNS redundancy in particular, are complex and often expensive challenges for network administrators. The possibility for human error leading to configuration errors and DNS failures, establishing where, and with which vendor in a distributed network an error has occurred, and the sheer disruptive power of DDoS attacks compound these challenges. Furthermore, increased redundancy across various environments within a network ecosystem often brings with it hindered visibility.

Without redundancies however, Networks are more susceptible to failure. Thus an important feature in the Men&Mice Suite 9.1 release is the improved xDNS Redundancy™.

xDNS Redundancy™ in Men&Mice Suite v9.1

Men&Mice Suite's xDNS Redundancy™ provides a level of abstraction that builds automation, provides centralized views, eliminates human error and removes conflicting DNS service provider platform complexities (e.g. incompatible APIs). It increases visibility and control of networks with hybrid or multiple cloud dns providers by unifying management, supporting Active Directory-hosted zones, offering the ability to create read-only zones (see below), and improving native support for Azure DNS and Amazon Route 53, all of which benefits the functionality and core health of IP infrastructure.

We think of it as “taking the ‘daunt’ out of DNS redundancy." It streamlines the migration and management of a large number of DNS zones, such as with Azure DNS and Amazon Route 53, by utilizing cloud-native features to monitor changes to DNS made outside of the Men&Mice Suite, greatly improving synchronization of DNS data from cloud providers. It also enables the assignment of read-only zones across the network to boost resilience against DDoS attacks and other DNS failures.

xDNS Redundancy™ for creating read-only DNS zones

It is now possible to mark a DNS zone in an xDNS replication group as read-only. While internal changes are synced, external modifications to read-only xDNS instances will not be replicated to other zones.

Once an xDNS zone redundancy group has been created, xDNS assists the administrator in creating identically replicated zone content, resulting in multiple equal master zones. Additional zones can be added or removed from the xDNS group as required.

If an xDNS zone is not available for updating (for instance - pun intended - if one DNS service provider experiences an outage) it will be marked as ‘out-of-sync’. Once it becomes available again, current data will be re-synchronized and updated from other zones.

All changes can be initiated by the authorized user through the Men&Mice Suite’s web-based or Windows-based management consoles or APIs, and will be applied to all zone instances in the group. All changes to xDNS grouped zones made externally, or outside of the Men&Mice Suite, will not be synchronized.

DNS management built for the cloud

A common pain point for CISOs and network managers is the lack of centralized views and the workflow automation difficulties of coordinating on multiple platforms. Whether you’re using a single-platform deployment or a combination of Cloud DNS providers (from Akamai Fast DNS to Azure DNS, Amazon Route 53 Dyn, NS1, or OpenStack), Men&Mice Suite’s xDNS gives you a convenient means to monitor and manage all your DNS resources within the Men&Mice Suite.

Simplifying the management of high-availability network resources across multiple environments is crucial for making network management intuitive and effective. To further address this, we added a web-based application in our 9.1 release, which rounds out the visibility trifecta that also includes a Windows-based management console as well as reliable and compatible REST, SOAP and JSON-RPC APIs. CISOs and network managers are able to look into their domains (again: pun absolutely intended ) from anywhere at any time, the way it works best for them.

The Men&Mice Suite is already known to be a robust DNS, DHCP and IPAM (DDI) solution that's easy to implement and able to leverage existing infrastructure investments to provide the visibility and ease-of-use for hybrid and multi-cloud environments that’s missing from competitive products.

Fast and efficient in heterogeneous DNS and DHCP environments, the Men&Mice Suite supports thousands of concurrent users and API connections, with millions of managed IPs and DNS records, for automation and provisioning, whether Unix/Linux, Windows, and Cisco IOS or across cloud services like Azure DNS, Amazon Route 53, Dyn, NS1 and Akamai Fast DNS, as well as IPAM in AWS, Azure and OpenStack.

We’ll be at VMWorld, at booth #2124 — let us show you how Men&Mice Suite’s xDNS functionality can ease network management and prevent against errors, DDoS and other attacks.