Technology | Ricoh Company Ltd.

Choosing Adonis for DNS and DHCP is Black & White for Ricoh

BACKGROUND

Ricoh Company Ltd. was founded in 1936, dedicated to the making and marketing of sensitized paper. In this, its 70th year, Ricoh employs over 75,000 employees worldwide and enjoys revenues in excess of US$17 billion annually. Sustained growth in revenue and profits supports their continued delivery of innovative products and solutions to the marketplace, making Ricoh pioneers in the development of computernetworked and multifunctional color/black & white digital imaging systems, facsimile products, printers, scanners, and more. With a distinguished presence worldwide, Ricoh’s 390 offices weave throughout the globe, from the Americas to Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia..

OPPORTUNITY

As a company that prides themselves in being “the leading international provider of the highest quality document and content management solutions for the 21st century workplace”, uninterrupted service availability and reliability was a key component to the company’s ongoing success. Ricoh was experiencing difficulty with its DNS functionality. Running business-critical DNS on Microsoft Windows however, IT administrators were forced to wrestle with network security issues regularly. Patching and upgrading DNS configurations was time consuming and costly, resulting in far too much service downtime. Additionally, because Ricoh’s network spanned multiple regional offices and was supported by several administrators in 13 different locations, maintaining consistency in DNS records was challenging. Ricoh needed a solution that would not only address it’s security concerns, but would also facilitate coherent change management.

SOLUTION

As Manager of Network Solutions at Ricoh, Bashir Khokhar from Ricoh’s Canadian Head Office traveled to the leading global technology tradeshow: Interop 2006 in Las Vegas, Nevada. He was drawn to the buzz around BlueCat Networks’ creative booth, which also presented secure, scalable, appliance-based “Command & Control of DNS, DHCP and IPAM”. A hardened, appliance-based solution made sense for Ricoh because it meant they did not have to purchase additional servers or manage another operating system in order to secure their network. Khokhar met directly with BlueCat technical engineers on site, and after viewing a virtual demonstration of Adonis’ features and functionality, he made arrangements to participate in BlueCat’s 30-day free trial program immediately upon return to the office. Impressed with Adonis’ featuresand functionality during the introductory program, Ricoh went on to promptly purchase two Adonis 1000 DNS/DHCP Appliances.

IMPACT

Khokhar and his team were particularly pleased with the ability to quickly and painlessly migrate Ricoh’s existing Microsoft Active Directory records to the new appliance, thereby effectively doing away with Microsoft for DNS entirely. Furthermore, using Adonis’ built-in error checking capabilities, Ricoh was able to identify and correct several errors in the previous DNS configurations before migration. This resulted in a seamless transition, free of configuration or replication errors – a true “Plug & Play” appliance that Khokhar has “almost never had to log on to since installation…we’ve eliminated our external DNS concerns, and I feel completely confident running the appliances without intervention”.

Given Adonis’ performance on the DNS side, Ricoh has since redone all the DHCP proxies as well. The entire process has been moved under the control of the integrated Adonis 1000 DNS/DHCP appliances. This way, network administrators can use the Adonis Management Console to get comprehensive views of all DNS and DHCP activity across the entire network from a single, centralized location. Since deploying Adonis, Ricoh’s uptime has exponentially improved, network operation is more efficient and secure, and they haven’t suffered from any more Zero-Day exploits. “There are very few things that I have bought in IT that I like” said Khokhar, “but the Adonis is definitely one of them”.