VeriSign Expands DNS Infrastructure in Europe

VeriSign, Inc. (VRSN) continues to invest in additional data center infrastructure to support the Internet domain name system (DNS). The company said today that it has deployed new data centers in Paris, France and Brussels, Belgium as part of Project Titan, its $100 million project to beef up its infrastructure.

VeriSign has continued its data center investment even as it refocuses its larger business by divesting non-core assets, including its Kontiki content delivery network. Domain names and SSL certificates will continue as the key business focus for the company, which also expanded heavily into mobile phone content (including the Crazy Frog ringtone).

In its latest move, VeriSign deployed new Regional Internet Resolutions Sites (RIRS) in Paris and Brussels. The company intends to have 100 RIRS locations around the globe by 2010 to support a 10-fold increase in the capacity of its global Internet infrastructure by 2010. VeriSign says the industrial-strength upgrades will provide better redundancy and reduced latency for DNS lookups that will improve the experience for users by reducing bottlenecks and increasing speed.

"VeriSign continues to roll out our infrastructure in key regions to meet the capacity, security and reliability demands of the future," said Ken Silva, chief technology officer, VeriSign. "By deploying a site in France, the more than 32 million Internet users will now have a faster and more reliable experience connecting to the .com and .net infrastructure. With our proven internal resources and our global network of providers in fast growing markets, VeriSign will continue to work to protect the .com and .net infrastructures against service disruptions, cyber attacks, and other vulnerabilities brought by massive growth."

Since 2000, the volume of Internet traffic on VeriSign's global infrastructure has increased from an average of 1 billion domain name system queries per day to a peak of more than 50 billion DNS queries per day under normal traffic conditions. Europe is the second largest region of DNS traffic and VeriSign is continually expanding its deployment of Regional Internet Resolution Sites in Europe and currently has several sites in Europe (in addition to France and Belgium) including: Germany, England, Sweden, Italy, Switzerland, Ireland and Poland.

Under Project Titan, VeriSign will increase its daily DNS query capacity from 400 billion queries a day to over 4 trillion queries a day and will increase the aggregate network bandwidth of its primary resolution centers around the world from more than 20 gigabits per second (Gbps) to greater than 200 Gbps per second.