Project Titan, unveiled at the RSA Conference in San Francisco involves additional capacity at the resolution servers we already have around the world, plus a number of new ones in places like Ireland, Egypt, the UK and India, said VeriSign chief security officer Ken Silva.
On the additional smarts side, Silva said VeriSign intends to peer with cable companies and smaller carriers for more granularity, rather than just aggregating and buying a big pipe from a big telco.
The objective here is to deliver ultra-fast response times on DNS queries, not only because the volume is set to skyrocket, as more and more devices communicate over the Net.
Thirty or 40 milliseconds’ delay for a DNS query is OK for a human being accessing a website, but not for a machine, so we’ll move the resolution servers closer together and distribute more of them around the world to shave 20-30ms off our response times, said Silva.
He said that this is not the first time VeriSign has undertaken such initiatives. Its Advanced Transaction Lookup And Signalling (ATLAS) infrastructure, implemented in 2000, added capacity and enabled the company to launch other directory services on the Net, and in his estimation, between 2000 and 2010 [when Titan is completed] we will have increased our query response capacity 10,000-fold.
The announcement comes a week after VeriSign confirmed that it intends to raise the price of .com and .net domain name registrations later this year, after a controversial year-long battle with its resellers and ICANN, its regulator.
The company said that the cost of Titan was already built into its financial models.
As for monetizing the Titan investment, Silva acknowledged that, as happened with ATLAS, Titan will enable other network-related services, such as a network routing directory for VoIP.
