As enterprises continue to evolve their hybrid, multi-cloud strategies, Infoblox is committed to delivering innovations that simplify networking, improve security posture and accelerate business transformation. Since the launch of Infoblox Universal DDI™ Product Suite in September 2024, we’ve continuously introduced many new features and enhancements. In the last three months, Infoblox has announced an integrated DDI solution with Google Cloud and rolled out many new product features and enhancements.
Key Highlights—What’s New in Universal DDI
Improve Efficiency and Security with Network Workspace Monitors
The Infoblox Portal provides out-of-the-box workspaces with custom-designed monitors to deliver real-time visualization and insights. Universal DDI released new Network Workspace monitors and business KPIs to enable customers to improve overall efficiency and security, lower costs and track DNS resolution performance:
- DNS Record Classification Monitor: Provides real-time, centralized monitoring and insights across key DNS categories in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and on-premises environments. DNS record classification monitors multiple record types, including dangling, abandoned and untrusted DNS records, to enhance security, improve efficiency and lower costs.
- Overlapping IP Blocks: Prevents connectivity issues from duplicate addresses, misrouted traffic and security risks, ensuring seamless network operations across multi-cloud and hybrid environments.
- DHCP Range Utilization: Prevents device connection failures and service disruptions to avoid running out of IPs, thereby enabling proactive management.
- Subnet Utilization: Enhances network efficiency, scalability and security while enabling proactive capacity planning and compliance by optimizing IP resource allocation, reducing costs and preventing service disruptions by avoiding IP exhaustion.
- DNS Resolution Time KPI: The new metric represents the average time required to resolve DNS queries across your network. This KPI helps track DNS resolution performance across the network by indicating whether resolution times are increasing or decreasing.
Simplify DDI Management with Ansible Collection, Python Client and Google Cloud Resolver
Universal DDI simplifies the management of DDI resources with:
- Ansible IPAM Collection: The new Ansible Collection for Universal DDI provides a set of modules and plug-ins to manage DDI resources through APIs. You can use these modules to create, modify, delete and update operations on various DDI objects and deploy NIOS-X servers.
- Python Client: The new Python Client for Universal DDI simplifies interactions with the Infoblox Portal via API, providing a preconfigured set of commonly used functions to manage DNS resources, create discovery jobs for on-premises and cloud resources, manage IP addresses and configure DHCP options.
- Manage Google Cloud Resolver Endpoints and Forwarding Rules: Universal DDI supports the discovery and management of cloud resolver endpoints for the Google Cloud, in addition to the existing support for AWS and Azure. This feature enables the configuration of forwarding rules from the Infoblox Portal to define how and where queries are routed in your hybrid, multi-cloud architecture.
Improve Visibility with Discovery and Insights
In addition to existing discovery methods, Infoblox Universal Asset Insights™ automates the discovery of active IP addresses in your network infrastructure using ping sweep, a network scanning technique. This enhancement ensures that the IP address management (IPAM) data remains current and accurate.
NIOS-X Server Enhancements and Hypervisor Support
Universal DDI expands NIOS-X support and enhancements to offer flexible deployments and enterprise-grade DNS and DHCP services:
- NIOS-X Virtual Servers on Google Cloud Marketplace: Provides simplified delivery of DNS and DHCP services and consistent management across all major public clouds and on-premises environments.
- NIOS-X Virtual Servers—Additional Hypervisor Support: Enables deployment of NIOS-X servers on a wider range of hypervisors, including VMware ESXi 8.x, Nutanix AHV and OpenShift.
- Local Logging from NIOS-X Servers: Allows you to configure and send DNS query and response and DHCP lease logs to a SIEM for further analysis. It can be configured at the global DHCP and DNS levels and fully supports new and existing deployments.
- NIOS-X as a Service Enhancements: Supports Anycast with the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), configuring a Network Time Protocol (NTP) server through global policy, simplified editing of service details, and more.
Transform Enterprise Networking with Infoblox Universal DDI for Google’s Cloud WAN
In early April, Infoblox announced a partnership with Google Cloud to simplify enterprise networking while helping organizations accelerate their cloud transformation journeys. The cloud-native offering combines Google’s own world-class global Cross-Cloud Network infrastructure with Infoblox Universal DDI’s NIOS-X as a Service. The fully integrated solution delivers reliable DNS and DHCP services without the need for on-premises hardware or software appliances, reducing the total cost of ownership. This Infoblox offering is available through the Google Cloud Marketplace.
Figure 1: Infoblox Universal DDI’s NIOS-X as a Service integrated in Google’s Cloud WAN
Universal DDI Customer Success—A Real-World Example
Organizations across various industries are experiencing transformative results with Infoblox Universal DDI. Here is a real-world example:
Department of Transportation of a Southeastern State in the United States Embraces Cloud First Principle
The Department of Transportation of a Southeastern State in the United States faced significant challenges with network management silos in their hybrid, multi-cloud environment. With disparate systems, they lacked visibility across multiple DNS providers—AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Microsoft for on-premises. They relied on Microsoft Excel and native solutions for IPAM, which was ineffective and hindered their ability to manage and secure their network infrastructure effectively. With the cloud-first initiative, they wanted to consolidate the data centers and move the workloads to the cloud.
The customer selected Universal DDI Product Suite to provide a unified platform for managing DNS, DHCP and IPAM across their hybrid, multi-cloud environment. With Universal DDI, the customer achieves:
- Centralized SaaS-managed DDI management across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud
- Accurate IPAM and comprehensive visibility with Universal Asset Insights
- Data center consolidation and migration of Microsoft on-premises DNS to NIOS-X Virtual Server in the cloud
Next Steps
Want to dive deeper into any of these updates? Reach out to your account executive or read our monthly Product Updates and Enhancements newsletter for more information.
Visit the Universal DDI Product Suite product page and hybrid, multi-cloud solution page on Infoblox.com to learn more.
