"Our bandwidth problems have been practically eliminated. Monitoring & customization is a snap with the web interface."
Desert Academy, Santa Fe, USA "We rolled out 1200 Chromebooks to classrooms and CACHEBOX means that we haven't needed to increase our bandwidth."
Rodney Leer, Brenham Independent School District, USA "ApplianSys is the only vendor that takes the time to look at our appliances for us, and it really goes a long way."
Mike Caruso, Orland Park Consolidated High School District 230, USA "The intricate nature of our system made it too challenging to support. With DNSBOX this is no longer the case."
Mark Albutt, Technical Manager, Probrand Limited, UK "CACHEBOX gives great performance - my network has been stable for 2 years now"
Vinit K, IT Manager, Shivnadar Foundation, India

Boral

About Boral
Boral is a worldwide construction company, based in Australia. The business has more than 15,000 employees, and 500 sites across Australia. Boral manufactures all types of construction materials from bricks and windows to tiles and concrete.
www.boral.com.au

Challenge
Boral was struggling with an unreliable DNS service from its Windows servers – lack of centralised management, no failover, and weaknesses in system security.

Boral had been using slow Windows-based PCs, some around six years old, to manage their external DNS. Critical resources like the company website, email, external remote access, vendor access, ecommerce and communication with US offices were all suffering as a result.

As well as slow name resolution, they were also regularly fixing Windows vulnerabilities which were becoming a real nuisance.

“There was no central management of DNS, no failover or disaster recovery in place, and we were constantly patching the operating system,” said Jonathan Walsh, Boral’s IT Security Administrator. “We couldn’t rely on the system we had in place. It just wasn’t an enterprise-class solution”.

Solution
Using DNSBOX and a DNS architecture recommended by ApplianSys, Boral has now got secure DNS, fast name resolution and failover.

Boral purchased a DNSBOX050 master, a failover unit and two DNSBOX010 slaves to manage their external DNS.  Using the orthodox DNS Best Practice architecture recommended by ApplianSys, it has hidden the master behind a firewall and only allows the slaves to respond to queries. Every time Jonathan’s team make a change to the central master, the slaves are alerted and begin a zone transfer. If the DNSBOX050 becomes unavailable, the failover will automatically pick up its workload and keep DNS running smoothly.

DNSBOX is built on a custom Linux operating system developed by ApplianSys especially for creating secure appliances. All application and operating system components that aren’t needed have been left out so the appliances are less vulnerable to threats from the outset.

What’s more, the simple point-and-click browser-based interface makes DNSBOX easy to setup and maintain. With support for secure, distributed administration built in, Jonathan can quickly delegate tasks to colleagues and free up his time to focus on managing other aspects of his network.

“Now we can offer much greater capacity with our DNS infrastructure and we no longer have to worry about six-year-old PCs breaking down. And, with our new DNS failover capability, if one data centre is down we can still have external resolution. It’s all seamless,” commented Jonathan.

Result
“I’m happy with everything,” continued Jonathan. “It’s a relief knowing that the ApplianSys equipment is out there and we don’t have to rely on slow, old PCs anymore.”

Jonathan is also pleased with the post-sales support, offered by ApplianSys and his local vendor, PCTime Australia.

“Support is excellent and PCTime is extremely helpful and conscientious. It’s been really valuable having access to support staff that really know their products and don’t tie you up in a complicated support system. What’s more we’re only ever one step away from the developers, which adds to our confidence in ApplianSys’ customer care,” he concluded.