Actually, we are having a very bad experience with Infoblox, especially the support. The engineering and the product teams are not fixing the issues on the spot. We were suffering a lot with them on the support issue. In cases where we have some specific fix that needs to be developed, they are not willing to do this unless they have a full product release or a new release and that may take months to cover the issue reported to them.
The main advantages with Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection are the dashboards, the reporting system, and they have the GUI interface.
A big problem is that they are considering enterprise and service providers as the same, which is not the case. They deal with the issues of the service provider at the same level as for the enterprise. This was the main issue. What is critical, what is a major incident or crisis for a service provider, is not necessarily an incident or a major crisis for an enterprise. If you have some minor issue in the enterprise, it could be affecting millions of people or millions of subscribers and for the service provider this is a carrier-grade major issue. However, it is a minor issue at the enterprise level. This is the point.
Customers are looking for stability, for latency, and for security. Most of the features that we are dealing with with Infoblox were disabled because of a malfunction or were causing some issues with the carrier-grade. This is the issue. They provide the solution. However, when you implement something, you find that it is causing issues in the network, and then the b-routers network elements. You have to disable these features and this is definitely impacting the customer.
The main weak point is the under layer, they need the security and the integration with network elements.
In terms of what I would like to see included with next release, right now they are not supporting high query logging. They have a very limited size for the syslog, so they are usually asking for external storage, external network, and integration in order to keep the syslog. If you are considering the high volume traffic of the carrier-grade, then the syslog will hold for around five to 10 minutes. This is not enough time and it is being rotated. This is the main issue and the main limitation that we face with them that they need to work on.
I have been using Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection for less than four years.
Infoblox, to be honest, is not stable. We are suffering a lot. If you are talking about the enterprise, it is stable, but when you add more features, like security features for threat analytics, ADB, and responsibility zones, and other features, these cause a lot of issues, especially with the huge volume of traffic with the carrier-grade and the service provider.
It has a limitation. For every feature you add, you should be very clear about what you are doing because some features create fluctuations, BGB, flapping, and they cannot sustain the huge amount of traffic for the carrier-grade. This is the issue.
Yes, it is scalable.
Support is the main issue. They are not supporting on the spot. Support with Infoblox is a nightmare.
This is their weakest point.
It is easy to install.
Deployment does not take too much time. It depends on the facility that you have - the server, the racks, the environment, but the installation process itself does not take much time. It is straightforward. This is one of the advantages that we have with the Infoblox - the installation, the dashboard, the GUI are easy to handle. However, this is not reflected to the customer who is looking for other features from the security perspective.
The administration and maintenance do not require too many people to work on it. Two or three are more than enough. These include the service professional teams of architects and engineers.
For the time being, we don't have a plan to expand the use of this product because we face a lot of limitations and a lot of issues with them. We are looking to replace them or at least to have another vendor, Akamai. This is the plan.
We have more than six million subscribers, end users, right now. We are providing this service through the six million subscribers, but we have different teams who are working on this tool - the operations team, the planning team, the execution and network monitoring teams. Many people are using this if you are talking about the network onsite, but this solution is provided to six million subscribers.
I am not sure about ROI, because in a couple of years we were thinking about swapping the whole solution, so there is no ROI in three years.
On a scale of one to five, I would rate them on ROI depending on whether you are considering the enterprise or the carrier-grade. For the enterprise, it could be higher. For the carrier-grade, you cannot run this.
They have different types of licenses. They have a perpetual license and they have a subscription license. The different types of licenses depend on the service that you are buying from them.
On a scale of one to five, I would rate them on pricing as a three.
They are putting some limitations on the sizing. Let's say you exceed the specific number of hits or number of queries per second, this requires another tier of license. They have different tiers of licenses depending on the number of queries, number of hits, and number of domains.
We are definitely thinking about other brands, for example, the F5. They have a very powerful solution as does Akamai. We have another solution, but I cannot remember the name right now. We are testing this at the VOC, but again, Infoblox is fine if you are considering it for the enterprise level, but for the carrier-grade, you should be very careful. You have a limited product that can support for the DNS domain.
We are trying right now to test Akamai. It is only in the initial phase, or maybe it's in a VOC phase. We don't have time yet to judge the Akamai solution, but as far as we know, this is more stable and the support team is more talented.
If it is a small-to-medium-scale company or organization, Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection might fit them very well. They will not face the issues that we are currently facing as a carrier-grade or a service provider. It is very stable. If you are considering the enterprise level, at a low to medium scale, you can use other features without any issues, but again, increasing the capacity or the size of the solution - the sizing of the query per second and number of hits - causes issues with them.
On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection at a six for the carrier-grade. And I would rate it eight or nine for the enterprise.
