Cisco Cisco Network Registrar 7.1 Data Sheet

Data Sheet

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Cisco Network Registrar 7.1

Product Overview

Cisco

Network Registrar

is an IP address management application that delivers IP address management (IPAM)

features to ease the task of administering Domain Name System (DNS) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol

(DHCP) services. For enterprise customers, Cisco Network Registrar offers a user-friendly GUI coupled with a built-

in, granular administrative role capability to help users focus on running their business rather than dedicating the

time to managing their DNS and DHCP services. For cable providers, Cisco Network Registrar provides scalable

DNS and DHCP services for millions of devices and forms the basis of a DOCSIS

cable modem provisioning

system. For telecom service providers, Cisco Network Registrar is an integral part of service networks such as DSL

and WiMAX as well as voice over IP (VoIP) and business services infrastructures.

Cisco Network Registrar includes a standards-compliant DNS server that offers an advanced feature set, with

support for incremental zone transfers, dynamic updates, and notifications. To secure DNS services, Cisco Network

Registrar supports transactional signature (TSIG) to authenticate DNS zone transfer and update requests. Cisco

Network Registrar DHCP server offers DHCP safe failover with redundant DHCP servers, dynamic DNS updates,

and DOCSIS cable modems and integration with directory services using Lightweight Directory Access Protocol

Version 3 (LDAPv3).

The scalable deployment architecture of Cisco Network Registrar consists of several local clusters and one regional

cluster. The local cluster is deployed in the network to handle DNS and DHCP services. The regional cluster is

usually deployed at the data center or the network operations center (NOC) for central management of the local

clusters.

The regional cluster implements many IPAM features to help users reduce operational cost. With IPAM, Cisco

Network Registrar administrators can control and monitor DNS and DHCP servers from a centralized location. This

capability eliminates many manual, repetitive, and error-prone tasks in configuring the local servers deployed in the

network and allows for a single point of data aggregation and delegation.

Address space management simplifies the task of managing address blocks and can be exercised from the regional

cluster. An address block can contain static or dynamic addresses and can have any number of child address blocks

culminating in one or more subnets. An administrator can break an address block into small units and push the

smaller blocks to a local cluster. Similarly, the administrator can also roll up address blocks in the local cluster under

their parent to provide a unified view of the address space. Instead of traversing every single local cluster to gather

subnet utilization and lease history information, Cisco Network Registrar administrators can achieve the same result

from the regional cluster and thus make the task of collecting usage data simple and virtually effortless. Without an

automated solution, the complexity of managing address blocks can be high, and the task can be tedious and time

consuming.

The regional cluster manages and monitors the local clusters through its cluster management capability. Cluster

management allows central management of address spaces and global protocol server configuration, such as

policies, client classes, and scope templates. Using the web UI, the administrator at the regional cluster can add and

manage a list of Cisco Network Registrar local clusters and their credentials. With this capability, Cisco Network

Registrar administrators can create and manage a list of Cisco Network Registrar local clusters using the web UI on

the regional cluster. To further ease the administration task, administrators can centrally manage the local clusters,

such as creating, pulling, and pushing VPNs, DHCP client classes, scope templates, and policies; managing failover