Take two: Nominum tries hosted DNS

Nominum is hoping that the second time is the charm in the outsourced DNS market, as the maker of high-end DNS software announces a hosted service on Tuesday.

Nominum had a managed DNS services operation earlier this decade but sold it to rival UltraDNS in 2002. Nominum has since focused on its DNS and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server software, counting among its customers many of the world’s largest carriers including Verizon, Sprint and NTT Communications.

[ Slideshow: How DNS cache poisoning works ]

On Tuesday, Nominum will reenter the outsourced DNS market with the announcement of SKYE, a separate business unit that will offer its software as a cloud-based service to smaller ISPs and enterprises.

Jon Shalowitz, vice president and general manager of SKYE, says the new venture’s biggest differentiator is the underlying Nominum software, which is higher performing and more reliable than open source alternatives such as Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND).

“This is the same software running in the top 100 ISPs around the world,” Shalowitz says. “It handles two to three trillion transactions or queries per day. We’re leveraging that same technology in a cloud model.”

SKYE’s main competitor will be UltraDNS, now owned by Neustar.

Rodney Joffe, senior vice president and senior technologist at Neustar, says hosted DNS is a big enough market to support multiple vendors. “Despite the fact that it’s been a pretty awful recession, we’ve continued to grow very effectively in our area of managed DNS for enterprises,” Joffe says. “There is definitely a market, and we’re nowhere near saturation.”

Nominum has set up SKYE as a separate organization, with 30 full-time employees and five data centers to run Nominum’s software.

“Enterprises need to wake up to the risks associated with ignoring their DNS and assuming that if it’s not breaking all they time [they] can ignore it,” Shalowitz says. “There are still a lot of organizations running legacy DNS and open source DNS that are fraught with vulnerabilities.”

SKYE is offering four hosted services: SKYE Core recursive DNS service; SKYE Secure authoritative (or external) DNS services; SKYE Search redirection service; and SKYE Trust, a blacklist service for malicious Web sites.

“Our target customer is anyone who has a strong Web presence: E-commerce companies, banks, anyone that has regulations for protecting data such as hospitals and healthcare companies; and any other company where breaches of personal information could be catastrophic such as credit card companies,” Shalowitz says.

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