Optimizing DNS - DHCP Services Delivery and Management

Project Type

Key Benefits

Orange Business Services is a major network service provider. With more than 65,000 clients and 200,000 sites hosted, the supply and the administration of the resources is a major issue in order to guarantee the quality of the services. Orange Business Services has a constant will for improving its technical efficiency and its financial profitability. As a consequence, they decided to equip the CIS (Centre for Internet Support) with a product able to respond to both objectives.

Thus, Orange Business Services chose EfficientIP and its software SOLIDserverTM to improve the management of their offer. They had three objectives: ensure network services high availability (especially for VoIP services), streamline the management of IP addresses and heterogeneous DHCP servers, and finally get a unified visibility and control of IP addresses and DHCP services.

Today, Orange Business Services has chosen SOLIDserver because it is the only product on the market able to respond to all the demands of the CIS exploitation team.
Thomas Fischer, Network Configuration Engineer

Overview & Challenges Faced

Orange Business Services understood before other competitors that the performance of a service offered to wide companies’ networks relies both on a rigorous organization of the operational teams and on a rational administration of the tasks to be achieved. The real challenge was therefore the heterogeneity of the DHCP services. The service was provided by 250 DHCP servers from different constructors (Novell, Microsoft and open source). Some were managed from a central point, others on their own, depending on the partners’ work method.

“In the CIS department, a big part of our tasks is related to DNS services’ management. They go from the configuration of the servers to the creation of zone resource records (RR),” said Thomas Fischer. “The exploitation of these resources is ensured in a daily manner and represents a huge amount of repetitive administrative tasks”.

This task multiplicity required Orange Business Services to exploit the services during off-peak hours – that is to say at the end of the day – in order not to impact their availability. The services had to be reloaded to ensure an efficient update. SOLIDserver dynamically takes into account any changes in the DNS services configurations. The update of the servers is done in real time, without service interruption.

This technology decreases the maintenance times and increases the reactivity and the quality that Orange Business Services offers to its clients. SOLIDserver rules interpreter automates the repetitive operations. For instance, it is possible to simultaneously create the PTR RR linked to an A RR in a reverse zone or even create slave zones at the same time as the master zones.

Solutions

“Some of our clients use addressing spaces inferior to 256 addresses; we must delegate the resolution of the zone of addresses for each existing address. We do it manually; it’s a long and tedious job that favors error. SOLIDserver allows us to automate the generation of a complete reverse zone configuration. This kind of functionality eliminates the errors and optimizes the quality and the productivity of the service”.

Orange Business Services wanted to be able to delegate some administrative tasks on certain parts of the DNS to non-expert administrators. Thomas Fischer still remembers his issues: “We needed a tool that was able to delegate exclusively the creation of RRs for some precise zones by some precise administrators. We needed simple graphic interfaces where input errors were systematically rejected”.

SOLIDserver was chosen because it simplifies the delegation by splitting the simple and elementary administrative tasks in order to meet multiple technical profiles of administrators. For each entry field in SOLIDserver interface, a compliance check is achieved in order to check the formats and the data validity in the precise context. A module within SOLIDserver was designed in order to manage the administrative rights on resources of specific groups of users.

Orange Business Services is a country-wide company. Its exploitation teams are spread across the country and they must be able to access SOLIDserver interfaces from any workstation whatever their administrative profile. Thanks to a WEB server, SOLIDserver allows any kind of user to access the application through an Internet browser The WEB technology simplifies the deployment, reduces structural costs and increases accessibility. That way, administrators can access SOLIDserver from anywhere and configure the DNS services.

​​SOLIDserver DNS module complies with 9.x versions of BIND DNS versions. Nowadays, it is a reference for the majority of the telecommunications operators. “Even if most of the parameters can be configured from the SOLIDserver interface, we need to have access to the local DNS servers configuration file and to standard BIND commands. SOLIDserver respects manual configurations: it automatically detects them, synchronizes them in the database and displays them immediately in the interface. This operation needs no particular attention; the synchronization is automatic, incremental -very fast- and asynchronous – not jamming”.

Orange Business Services has chosen SOLIDserver because it is the only product on the market able to respond to all the demands of the CIS exploitation team.

​​Through a methodical internal analysis, Orange Business Services determined the set of functionalities necessary to the daily enhancement of the service administration. These functionalities were submitted to EfficientIP in order to evaluate theSOLIDserver product.

Results

Through SOLIDserver, Orange Business Services has been able to improve its work processes and guarantee a better and simpler service both internally and for its customers. Orange Business Services think that SOLIDserver today is the most adapted tool for the DNS clients management.

More than 100 Orange Business Services administrators use SOLIDserver, whatever their administrative profile and their geographical location. This was achieved through the implementation of precise administration mechanisms that guarantee the coherence and the respect of the naming plan of Orange Business Services clients. EfficientIP and Orange Business Services CIS successfully integrated SOLIDserver solution in few days, and updates are deployed in less than two hours for one hundred or so administrators and several DNS servers. With SOLIDserver, EfficientIP offers a simple and scalable solution for operators that allows them to manage the naming system as well as the addressing plans of both public and internal IP addresses.