Hi Hank,
I am curious, what makes proximity checking so important? I am also curious
about how you learned that UltraDNS uses a static list, even if it is a
'static' list it is updated frequently and likely only contains the kinds of
errors that don't really affect you unless you have quite a few more than 4
locations. For example, if your locations in north america are Toronto,
Seattle and DC, it doesn't matter too much if an IP in Atlanta is 90ms to DC
AND 75ms to Toronto, but it would matter if you had three other data centers
in the south to make that fine grained matching more worthwhile.
I know with Quova one of the first things I asked them about was the case of
our own office IP which in their db returns Toronto and it kind of pissed me
off that they couldn't see that the round trip time clearly showed this IP
could not really be in Toronto, if you picked a few dozen known to 100%
IP/locations and tested latency from those you could get a pretty good fudge
factor to correct data or at least show it as being suspect.
Anyway, I have used UltraDNS in the past, there is also a company called
Netriplex that is a newcomer in comparison, but their pricing is a lot
better, not too cheap, not as expensive. They don't have as good as a
network as UltraDNS either.
Eric Frazier
Senior Architect
216 Main Street, Suite 312
Bathurst, NB, E2A 1A8
Canada
Phone : +1 506 546 8292
Fax : +1 506 546 8092
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Hank
Nussbacher
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2008 7:21 AM
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Looking for geo-directional DNS service
At 12:14 AM 16-01-08 +1300, jamie baddeley wrote:
Yes, but that would require them to run a DNS server at each of their 4
locations. They do not want to run their own DNS. They want it outsourced.
Thanks,
-Hank
Thought about anycasting? Broad as a barn door, but if you add health
checking of the services and integrate that into what your DC router
announces you get closer to what you want.
jamie
On Tue, 2008-01-15 at 12:55 +0200, Hank Nussbacher wrote:
I am looking for a commercial DNS service that provides
geo-directionality. Suppose I have 4 data centers scattered thruout
the world and want users to hit the closest data center based on
proximity checks (pings, TTLs, latency, load, etc.). I know one can
"roll their own", using various geo-locational data from companies
like Maxmind. I am
*not* interested in that. I am *not* interested in applicances like
the Cisco ACE GSS 4400 either (that do this as well):
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/contnetw/ps4162/
What I am looking for is a commercial DNS service.
Is the Akamai Edgescape service the closest to what I want:
http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/products/edgescape.html
Is anyone using it? Can you recommend it?
Another service I know about is the Ultradns (now Neustar) Directional
DNS:
http://www.neustarultraservices.biz/solutions/directionaldns.html
But this service is based on statically defined IP responses at each
of their 14 sites so there is no proximity checking done.
Thanks,
Hank