Neustar UltraDNS Infrastructure Summary
UltraDNS Whitepaper

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I. The NeuStar UltraDNS system and network architecture

A. UltraDNS architecture is comprised of three different levels:

• System level - multiple separate, yet related meshes of servers that have aprimary-and-secondary or master-and-slave relationship.
• Mesh level - multiple nodes that have identical data sets, which aresynchronized via replication over the wide area network.
• Node level - system components, co-located at the same network point ofpresence and functioning together to provide the DNS protocol service.

B. UltraDNS data model

The UltraDNS node is designed around a data model maintained within acommercial database. The data model contains information about principalobjects managed by the system (e.g., users, DNS zones, and resource records)and additional information required to control processes operating on the data(e.g., service configuration parameters and ACL info). Various functionalities ofthe UltraDNS system are provided by numerous disparate processes, which primarily serve as a conduit between the database and end-user requests.

C. UltraDNS name servers

UltraDNS name servers answer Internet protocol DNS queries based onauthoritative DNS data maintained in the database. One major Neustar UltraDNS innovation was the ability to make an authoritative DNS server thatwas capable of answering DNS from a database-reliant system at a speedcomparable to that of a memory-resident system, such as BIND. NeuStar UltraDNS uses network deployment and routing control to allow the scalability ofsuch a system by linear addition of hardware to meet load requirements along with DNS-specific caching algorithms and associated cache invalidationmechanisms. With this configuration, the UltraDNS system has confirmed loadcapacity one order of magnitude above the combined load of all existing TLDs.