Growing Global Adoption Of Nominum's Intelligent DNS Spells Obsolescence For Legacy DNS Implementations

Over 100 Million Broadband Households Already Benefit from Safer, Secure, More Efficient Internet Experience

Redwood City, Calif. – August 18, 2009 – Nominum, the leader in intelligent network naming and addressing solutions, announced today that more than 100 million broadband households around the world now benefit from its Intelligent DNS systems.  Continued rapid expansion at leading service providers globally will bring the benefits to more than 170 million by year end, which represents nearly half of the entire broadband Internet.

Nominum’s Intelligent DNS systems play a critical role in ensuring that Internet users benefit from an efficient, safe, and secure Internet experience.  In contrast, legacy DNS systems that passively answer network queries are holdovers of legacy network strategies now deemed obsolete.  These older DNS systems were not designed to ensure user trust, honor end user intent, support compliance efforts, provide navigation assistance, and worse, often blindly direct users to Internet destinations hosting unwanted, illegal or malicious content. Failing to address these deficiencies in the DNS itself is a disservice to the Internet and its users.

“Over the last 25 years the DNS has grown with the Internet. The DNS was originally the scalable directory for host names and has expanded to include multiple independent databases for threat and reputation data", said Dr. Paul Mockapetris, Chief Scientist at Nominum. "Intelligent DNS is the logical evolution of DNS to support all of these uses in a coherent framework. It lets ISPs create policies combining raw DNS directory data with other public and private information in real time so users go to intended and safe destinations. ISPs can customize Intelligent DNS to meet the protection and compliance needs of individual users and jurisdictions.”

Reinforcing a corporate commitment to protect the Internet and ensure trust in each Internet transaction, Nominum is also announcing the end-of-life of its Caching Name Server (CNS), a product that formed the foundation of the early broadband Internet.  CNS was developed eight years ago, just after the release of BIND 9, and enjoyed wide adoption in networks worldwide.  Designed to offer performance and availability improvements over other systems, it quickly became a cornerstone of network architectures, readily accommodating the rapid growth of broadband in that era.  Since the introduction of CNS, the Internet has undergone radical changes and the demands on, and role of the DNS have changed.  In light of these changes, Nominum no longer considers CNS or any other passive DNS system, a viable option for today’s Internet and its users. 

“CNS has been the workhorse of the broadband Internet. It was also a highly successful product and a major contributor to Nominum’s success.  At the same time, advancements to our DNS and the evolution of the Internet have led our customers to embrace Nominum’s intelligent DNS systems,” said Tom Tovar, CEO of Nominum.  “Today, the uses of DNS have changed and Internet providers of all sizes are deploying Nominum’s Intelligent DNS systems to deliver enhanced security, safety and value added services across their networks and end user subscribers.”

Nominum’s VantioTM DNS servers and TRUE ArchitectureTM are now widely deployed. Vantio and its advanced service delivery modules replace the highly successful CNS platform.  These intelligent DNS systems substantially enhance the way the DNS works and offer new network architectures and strategies for today’s Internet.  Rather than limiting DNS to blind resolution of names, Nominum’s intelligent DNS systems bring the power of policy based control to every DNS request and direct users to safe and intended destinations.  These benefits are further improved by leveraging real-time data sources such as search, or live data feeds that track botnets, phishing sites, and sites hosting illegal content.
 
(Editor’s note: See also today’s release entitled, “Nominum’s Intelligent DNS Gives Service Providers Commanding Advantage in fight Against Internet Threats” for more details).