Nominum provides DNS and DHCP platforms with scalability, reliability, availability, and performance that are unmatched in the industry today. Nominum’s DNS platform provides the most advanced layered security defenses available, protecting more than 150 Million broadband households. Nominum’s products were developed by engineering teams based on lessons learned from writing BIND (version 9) and ISC-DHCP (version 3). In contrast to open source solutions Nominum’s products are commercial grade and focus on carrier-class requirements that include:

Intelligent DNS server, modular architecture
Nominum offers the industries only intelligent caching DNS server with a modular design specifically optimized for service delivery and security. Embedded intelligence allows Nominum DNS servers to intelligently manage DNS queries, and query responses, to ensure users are protected and to enable new kinds of DNS based services. Service capabilities are enabled with optional Service Delivery Modules

Most advanced DNS security features available today
Nominum’s Vantio provides multi-layer intelligent defenses that defeat DNS cache poisoning and other attacks, including the recently publicized Kaminsky cache poisoning vulnerability described in US CERT VU#800113. Four layers of defenses – Deterrence, Defense, Resistance, and Remediation – far surpass the industry standard UDP Source Port Randomization (UDP SPR). DNS solutions that use open source lack protections beyond basic UDP SPR and leave customers exposed to the widely acknowledged dangers cache poisoning presents.

Leading performance and scalability
Nominum products are designed for massive scaling, supporting 150 Million broadband households around the world today. They make optimum usage of available processing resources and avoid “all-in-memory” implementations that degrade or fail in unexpected ways as resource management needs grow. Open source suffers from poor performance especially as incremental features (such as basic security features) are turned on.

No downtime
Most DNS or DHCP servers cannot be reconfigured online without a shutdown and restart, have lengthy startup times while they read all their data into memory, and will not recover from spikes in traffic or Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. Nominum implementations were specifically designed from the ground up to avoid these fundamental flaws.

State of the art implementations
Nominum products are written and maintained solely by Nominum and take advantage of the latest engineering practices along with exhaustive testing to ensure the products meet rigorous quality standards and carrier grade expectations. Nominum recognizes this is a prerequisite for supporting critical infrastructure services. Open source products typically have to contend with a wide quality range when incorporating contributions from the developer community.

Driven by customer requirements
Nominum's products are driven exclusively by the business needs of customers and focused on the critical requirements faced by organizations that recognize naming and addressing are critical infrastructure requirements that directly contribute to market success.

Support
Nominum products are backed 7x24x365 with talented engineers steeped in the knowledge obtained from DNS and DHCP pioneers who have actively led the advancement of Internet name and address technologies.