The more than 11 million. de-domains get a new home! On September 11th 2007, the German registry DENIC will officially take into service the first of two new computing centers in Frankfurt, which in the future will be responsible for the administration of .de-domains.
The shift to a new computing center is the first step towards a comprehensive infrastructure renewal project. The complete network and computing infrastructure of the German domain registry is being adapted for the growing needs of the future. For domain owners of .de domains, the change is transparent and will not affect their domains. Everything takes place behind the scenes.
The goal of this project is to develop an optimal technical design on the basis of the existing and requirements layed out for the future of DENIC’s service infrastrukture. To facilitate this,two independent computing centers, one in Frankfurt and one in Amsterdam, were selected from professional data center service providers. The new network design enables the fast and redundant synchronization of data pools in both computing centers. DENIC chose a flexible network infrastructure with sufficient redundancy and scalability options. Each computing center can facilitate all the services DENIC requires with duplicate hardware infrastructure. This was already true for DENIC’s basic services but in the future all services will benefit from this redundant infrastructure.
“Where ever we only had one server in a data center in the past, we now have two.”, clarifies Andreas Bäß, who is a member of the technology board of directors at DENIC and in charge for this project. ” In addition of creating a highly redundant infrastructure, the maintenance possibilities of our systems are also strongly. For the coming years, we expect increasing numbers of name server queries, whois-utilization and domain requests. For this increase, DENIC is now better prepared.”
Until now, DENIC offered all of its services from two separate computing centers. One of which was located with a data center service provider and the other one in house.
“Our core competency however is not to run a high security computing center”, describes Andreas Bäß. “This move allows us to concentrate on our real task: providing quality and valuable services in the area of domain administration.”
Brand new computing equipment was purchased for the new computing center in Frankfurt amounting to millions of Euros. The present computers, which run DENIC’s day-to-day business in the old data center are being used for the transition period and will be shipped to the new data center in Amsterdam, to be integrate its into the second geographically redundant computing center. Amsterdam will also benefit from a heavy investment in new hardware infrastructure. “Having geographically far removed data centers is common practice for major international registries. Amsterdam is, like Frankfurt, a large internet hub with very good connections. Those data centers are now far enough away from each other to keep the next domain services up and running in case of a large catastrophe in Frankfurt but get close enough for our employees to commute easily between the two locations.”
Source: DENIC Press Release in German – September 10th, 2007 – Translated by DomainNews’ Chief Editor
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