Why is the current approach of DNS-DHCP service management limited, insufficient and risky?

Even if it is done from a centralized platform, the current practice is based on a server by server approach. This approach is not sufficient to ensure service reliability, security and easiness of management.

• High risks of misconfigurations.
• No Best Practices enforcement to ensure the high security of the network services architecture.
• No automation of architecture deployment and management.
• Difficult and risky architecture changes.

Indeed, even if the configuration has been simplified with GUI, it is still complex, expensive and requires experts to deploy and configure all servers in coherent architectures of DNS-DHCP services. There is no process to check the relevance of your server configurations according to best practices and to the requirements of your network services architecture, such as for instance a Master/Slave or Stealth DNS. In addition, there is no configuration automation of the service architecture to simplify deployments and ensure compliances with the best practices.

Consequences of this complexity are directly linked to critical risks in term of security and availability of your network services.

How Does EfficientIP solve this?

SmartArchitecture is a new approach to IPAM and DNS-DHCP services management to drastically simplify deployment and administration of your network service. Thanks to SmartArchitecture™, EfficientIP offers the capability to manage your DNS-DHCP services not only at the server level but at the architecture level.

SmartArchitecture™ are State of the Art templates of DNS-DHCP architectures that are applied on a list of servers to automatically deploy and manage the architectures as a single entity. SmartArchitecture™ is compatible with EfficientIP's appliances, Microsoft® Windows DNS&DHCP servers, Open source servers (ISC Bind9.x and ISC DHCP), Nominum® engines and Cisco® DHCP server.

All SOLIDservers™ belonging to the SmartArchitecture™ will automatically be configured by the SmartArchitecture™ to establish a communication path among SOLIDservers™ (or multi-vendor servers), securing communication flow and synchronizing data.

SmartArchitecture™ Key Benefits:

• Increased reliability and security of your DNS & DHCP services by automating best practices enforcement.
• Free oneself of deployment complexity: Automate your DNS & DHCP services architecture deployment
• Management ease: Simplify the management of your network services by directly managing the server architecture and automating all server configurations of the SmartArchitecture™.
• SmartArchitecture™ motion: Easiness of architecture migration and reorganization with “Drag and Drop” architecture changes.

SmartArchitecture™ is a turning point in network services management efficiency, bringing unmatched levels of reliability, scalability and flexibility. A SmartArchitecture™ enables you to perform complex administration tasks in a few minutes and very simply. A migration of a Master/Slave to Stealth or multi Master is automatically done by selecting the adequate SmartArchitecture™ to apply on the DNS servers. It is now very easy to add or remove DNS-DHCP servers from the architecture; the SmartArchitecture™ will automatically manage all configuration file modifications. The overall process management is carried out at the SmartArchitecure™ level by the SmartArchitecture itself™.