Delivering uninterrupted network services is more than a critical business goal: loss of network operations and denial of access to network services can have tremendous impact on an organization’s bottom line.
The patented Infoblox Grid is an elegant and powerful solution that provides resilient network services, failover, recovery and seamless maintenance. The Grid supports Infoblox deployments inside a single building, across enterprise networks and between remote locations. By establishing a distributed relationship between individual or paired appliances, the Infoblox Grid removes single points of failure and other risks inherent in legacy DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management infrastructure.
With the addition of the Multi-Grid Management architecture to the base Infoblox Grid, organizations can support thousands of hosts, centralized management of IPv4 and IPv6 networks, partitioning data by geography or department, single sign-on and other advanced capabilities.
The Infoblox Grid provides a modular, layered architecture that enables a collection of appliances to perform and be managed as a single, unified system. The Grid Master, an Infoblox appliance that holds and maintains the central database of the Grid, sits at the heart of this highly scalable, reliable and fault-tolerant solution. The Grid Master pushes global configuration data and updates out to Grid Members, monitors member operations, synchronizes member changes back into the central database. The Grid Master prevents a single point of failure through an interconnected chain of failovers:
The Grid uses a zero-admin, distributed database. The Grid’s real-time distributed database technologies guarantee data integrity, making possible trusted, up-to-the-moment audits — including records of administrative changes — for any part of the network domain. The data integrity mechanisms also ensure that any required recovery is complete, accurate and up-to-date.
The Grid Manager provides centralized management over the entire Grid. From the moment a Grid Member joins the Grid, the Grid Manager is used to manage the member. The Grid Manager, which runs on the Grid Master, then instructs the specific Grid Member of the exact operation it needs to perform. This solution lets any system administrator manage multiple Grid Members through only a single web interface, which leads to lower operational cost, reduces potential errors and improves overall efficiency.
The Infoblox Grid includes “Auto-sync” functionality, so when a new Member joins the Grid, the Grid Master checks to see that the Grid Member includes the latest software. If not, the Grid Master sends upgrades to the Grid Member. This elegant solution ensures services are up and running as quickly as possible, saving the time needed to deploy a Grid Member or perform manual software upgrades. It also reduces errors by ensuring the appropriate software versions are installed.
All communications between the Grid Master and its Grid Members are encrypted through a VPN tunnel, which reduces the Grid’s vulnerability to network attacks and leads to higher availability, reliability and a better overall deployment.
The Infoblox Multi-Grid Management solution gives you control over Grid Masters, each of which can control Grid members and virtual environments with individual policies and configurations. The Multi-Grid Master affords you complete visibility into each of the individual Grid Masters and their components and devices, real and virtual, and allows you to access and control any part of any Grid member or environment. Through its capability of managing a large number of Grids and thousands of members, a Multi-Grid Management solution provides massive scalability, high performance and high availability.
Multi-Grid Management offers the flexibility to build a sophisticated Grid topology to meet specific requirements. For example, an organization can employ the capabilities of Multi-Grid Management to segment its network by region (e.g., North America, Asia, and Europe) or by business line (e.g., different corporate divisions and various branch locations) and still be able to update all segments at one time. Or for security reasons, such as internal/external environments or internal security silos, an organization might use Multi-Grid Management to partition its data on a corporate network and still provide access to all who need it.
Multi-Grid Management can also be used by a Managed Service Provider (MSP) to manage multiple customers.
Multi-Grid Management provides a single global view of IPv4 and IPv6 data across multiple Grids, which is essential for cutover deployment and dual-stack systems. Multi-Grid Management lets you visualize network information including overlaps and gaps in address space, which simplifies IP address administration and reduces potential errors. Multi-Grid Management also provides more flexibility and easier administration with block allocation, such as delegating address blocks to sub-Grids and limiting expansion of sub-Grids.
Single sign-on capabilities allow system administrators to move from the Multi-Grid Manager to Grid Manager without re-authentication, speeding up the administration process, allowing the system administrator to focus on more critical tasks. Once an administrator logs on to a sub-Grid, he or she can then manage DNS, DHCP and other protocols/services.
Multi-Grid Management includes extensive monitoring capabilities that allow system administrators to easily spot and correct problems. Views include status of all Grids, the number of members in a Grid, protocol availability and much more.
Learn more about the Infoblox Grid™ and Multi-Grid Management through the following resources:
