DHCP Solutions
Carrier-class, DHCP High-availability and Fault-tolerant User Access
AppDirector™ performs advanced health checks by network pool and DHCP range to monitor DHCP replies to subscribers and ensure DHCP server availability along with sufficient IP address ranges across virtualized DHCP pools. AppDirector DHCP health checks include:
- Verification of both DHCP server and service availability
- DHCP request simulation which verifies dynamic IP addresses range availability using DHCP relay information and Gi address field content. In the event of request failure, AppDirector redirects users to DHCP servers which have available IP addresses matching the specific originating access network.
- Configuring AppDirector on the fly to prevent service disruption or to restart the server to implement configuration changes, for immediate service recovery following network outages
Consolidated, Flexible DHCP Services with Massive Scalability and OPEX/CAPEX Savings
AppDirector enables the consolidation of DHCP servers, making it possible to centrally manage DHCP IP addressing schemes across independent access networks. AppDirector forwards DHCP traffic according to access network ID, directing requests to the relevant available address pool by network. By managing DHCP loads while maintaining transaction persistency, AppDirector affords full infrastructure flexibility and the consolidation of DHCP server architectures, for OPEX/CAPEX savings. By enabling the distributed processing of large volumes of DHCP requests from across access networks, AppDirector delivers significant scalability benefits to serve millions of leases, while providing superior throughput. In addition, AppDirector eliminates the need for DHCP server synchronization.
Virtualized DHCP Architecture, Global Disaster Recovery
AppDirector Global enables the virtualization of DHCP services across multiple data centers and dispersed locations for full site redundancy and automatic disaster recovery, ensuring fully transparent global failover services to customers. With AppDirector Global, two DHCP servers can share an address pool in a two-node, active-active cluster spanning any distance. With each DHCP request, AppDirector retains Layer 7 network source information, enabling global load distribution of requests, taking into account server health, address pool availability and real time loads to service the entire community of devices using a fault-tolerant distributed architecture.
DHCP Flood Attack Mitigation and DHCP Service Security
AppDirector security modules provide real-time protection against network DHCP floods and mitigate known signature attacks and malicious user access.
- DHCP flood protection – Utilizing deep packet inspection (DPI) and behavioral DoS protection, AppDirector detects DHCP floods, blocking DHCP requests originating from a single relay that exceed a defined threshold and frequency. DHCP servers are particularly vulnerable to UDP-based floods, as UDP is connectionless and thus readily susceptible to the spoofing of thousands of sources approaching the server. AppDirector’s behavioral engine automatically creates a signature to mitigate UDP floods, blocking spoofed attack traffic without impacting legitimate traffic.
- DHCP intrusion prevention – Protection from operating system-level exploits are provided via AppDirector’s IPS module that includes pre-defined attack signature groups for DHCP security. In addition, Radware’s Security Update Service delivers automated updates of security signature groups, providing ongoing protection from new OS exploits and emergent security threats.