IP Address Management solutions provider Nominum has deployed its Foundation Caching Name Server at Telefónica de España. The European and Latin American carrier will use the systems in its European data centers in Spain.

Telefonica’s market capitalization is third among worldwide service providers. The company serves both fixed and mobile telephony businesses and is focusing on DNS-dependent broadband as the future for both services on a global basis.

“DNS is like the virtual electricity of the Internet. If it goes down, it’s like having no more power: nothing works. It might not sound super sexy, but then if it doesn’t work, you make the national news,” said Albert Gouyet, vice president of marketing for Nominum.

Nominum claims its CNS is the industry’s fastest caching name server. The company’s Foundation product family includes scalable and secure DNS and DHCP servers as well as IP address management systems. It is targeting carriers around the world that are migrating to an IP network or upgrading their existing IP networks.

Telefonica is using the system for its residential and converged business-oriented broadband services. The carrier, like most Tier 1 carriers, has been using implementations of BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) to run their IP and Internet services. But as networks get more complex, and as attacks appear that overload the DNS, BIND just doesn’t scale, Gouyet said.

“People can learn by pain or by revelation, and they seldom have revelation. They feel the pain and get pushed over the edge and start thinking about their DNS,” Gouyet said.

Telefonica felt the pain in February 2004 when a virus pushed its BIND servers over the edge. Rather than doubling the number of DNS servers, the carrier began looking for a scalable software solution and chose Nominum.

Nominum was founded in 1999 by chief technology officer David Conrad to develop BIND9 and ISC DHCP3 for the Internet Software Consortium (ISC.) In 2000, Nominum offered a domain name system (DNS) hosting service called Global Name Service, which hosted thousands of enterprise customers as well as several top-level domains. It was based on the DNS technology that Paul Mockapetris, chairman and chief scientist, invented in the 1980s at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute.

In 2002, Nominum sold its managed service business to concentrate fully on developing and supporting next-generation solutions. Its customers include British Telecom, Samsung Networks, ASAHI Net, COLT Telecoms, NTL, Telewest, 3 and KPN.