A giant leap for BlueCat Integrity

This week we’re excited to release a new version of BlueCat Integrity, which brings next level DNS to our customers through significant new features and enhancements. Watch what BlueCat’s Andrew Wertkin has to say about it in this three-minute preview:

Here are the four key areas where we’ve made significant improvements:

Hybrid environments and automation

Our customers are rapidly moving compute and infrastructure to the cloud, and we continue to deliver capabilities to deploy Adaptive DNS to support hybrid cloud environments. The latest version of Integrity adds the ability to deploy BlueCat Address Manager in Azure environments.

Integrity 9.0 also introduces enhanced dynamic DNS (DDNS) support for dual-stack DHCP clients, also known as DDNS Dual-Stack Mixed-Mode (DSMM). DSMM enables a seamless environment with no disturbances in service. In other words, employees can unplug their laptop from a docking station, walk across the office, and maintain support between different networks as well as between IPv4 and IPv6.

On the automation front, we’ve made some significant improvements to the BlueCat API. We’re releasing new APIs for replication and trust relationships as well as user sessions for facilitating temporary admin access. We’ve enhanced our APIs for improved IP management and also enriched existing APIs with a view towards the automation needs of our customers.

Finally, we’re also making some significant updates to BlueCat Gateway, our automation platform. We think you’re going to be very excited about where we’re going with Gateway. So much so that we’re going to save that for another upcoming blog!

Enhanced reliability and visibility

The upcoming 9.0 release of Integrity introduces streaming replication, which improves database replication compared with the previous approach. Furthermore, reboots of the primary BlueCat Address Manager during replication-related management operations are no longer needed. By removing this limitation, Integrity 9.0 increases service uptime and API availability and removes any risk related to reboots, such as extended boot times due to file system checks.

And we’ve enhanced our UI to provide easier insight into replication health and latency. SNMP is also enhanced, allowing administrators to poll the full replication health and get the status of each node, making the information that exists in the UI accessible to SNMP-based monitoring systems. The UI has also been updated to establish a secure trust channel between two or three BlueCat Address Managers. This secure channel is used for upgrades and database replication operations.

Strengthened security

We’ve done quite a bit from a security standpoint as well. One of the big areas is managing group-level admin access through TACACS and LDAP, offering the ability to provide temporary admin-level access but also include audit ability.

In addition to other enhancements in the UI, we’ve also implemented improvements to reduce brute force attacks with features like delaying the login, user lockout capabilities, and forcing password change on first login.

Simplified upgrades

Finally, we’ve made some updates to our upgrade process that will benefit customers and support their high availability requirements. For all releases following 9.0, when a customer upgrades from 9.0 (or a later release), they will not have to break replication in order to move forward and/or to upgrade.

Integrity version 9.0 is now available for BlueCat customers and we think that you’ll be just as excited as we are about everything that we’ve put into this release!

This is what next level DNS looks like.