NIC Mexico Improves the .MX Domain Names Infrastructure

NIC Mexico (www.nic.mx), the organization that manages the country code top level domain .MX, presented a new technology development that strengthens the performance of its infrastructure.

“Two years ago, we implemented the Shared Unicast/Anycast technology in one of our servers. This scheme prevents the users from experiencing service degradation in the DNS (Domain Name System) of .MX domain names. During 2005 we implemented the same scheme in all the DNS servers from our network,” mentioned Oscar Robles, CEO at NIC Mexico.

“The main idea of the Anycast scheme is to provide a fault tolerant infrastructure for the DNS service of .MX domain names. If any of the servers working under this scheme fails, the requests made by the users for .MX domain names are distributed to the rest of the servers, which ensures high availability of the services we provide,” said Robles.

Robles mentioned that they analyzed the requests they received for .MX domain names to decide the location of the new servers that work under the Anycast scheme. The servers’ network now has 2 global nodes in the United States (San Francisco and San Jose, CA), 2 global nodes in Mexico (Monterrey and Mexico City) and 1 local node in New York City.

“Each of the servers that work under the Anycast scheme uses different hardware and software components in order to avoid vulnerabilities of using homogenous implementations,” commented Robles.

He also mentioned that the Anycast scheme was developed by Mexican engineers and that NIC Mexico is one of the firsts country code Top Level Domain administrators (ccTLD) that have implemented this scheme, being the first in Latin America in doing so.

“The users of .MX domain names have benefits with this technological development, because our services are supported by one of the most reliable infrastructures worldwide,” concluded Oscar Robles.

Responsible for the .MX domain names

NIC Mexico, as .MX domain name administrator, is responsible for maintaining the relationship among the .MX domain names and the servers of the companies or individual registrants of .MX domain names.

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