Infoblox Extends DNS Reach to AWS

One of the things that holds hybrid cloud computing back is the simple fact that it’s not easy to get two or more instances of a cloud to share the same set of network services.

In a major step towards making it a lot a lot easier to share network services across hybrid clouds, Infoblox today unveiled Infoblox DDI for Amazon Web Services (AWS); a virtual appliance through which IT organizations can remotely handle DNS, DHCP and IP address management.

While IT organizations have been able to manage those network services on AWS before, Arya Barirani, vice president of product marketing at Infoblox, said for the first time IT organizations can now manage them using the same management platform they use to manage DNS, DHCP and IP addresses on premise. That means instead of having to manage these network services in isolation, the same network team can manage them on AWS as a natural extension of their existing Infoblox management platform.

Naturally, there are more network services that have to be extended into the cloud to enable true heterogeneous cloud management. It’s relatively simple to share network services across, for example, two instances of VMware-based clouds. But in the case of an AWS platform based on an implementation of Xen hypervisors, most IT organizations can’t easily extend their existing network services out to AWS. The end result is a lot of semi-autonomous clouds that have to be managed in isolation; which only serves to drive up the total cost of ownership for each cloud service that an IT organization decides to deploy and ultimately secure.

More challenging still, most of those external cloud computing environments are a lot more dynamic than the on premise environment that most internal IT organizations are used to managing. As such, managing the assignment of IP addresses in the cloud and on premise requires a more robust platform than an IT organization would need if they only deployed applications on premise or in the cloud. In fact, given the number of IT organizations these days that are all in the public cloud or all on premise is few and far between, management of IP addresses has already become a headache.

Obviously, solution providers have the option to either resell Infoblox DDI for Amazon Web Services or deploy it themselves in order to manage network services on behalf of the their customers. In either case, helping IT organizations address DNS, DHCP and IP address management clearly represents an opportunity to add value at a time when the cloud platform itself is already little more than a commodity.