GE Appliances secures plant operations with DNSBOX
At GE Appliances' headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky — the largest manufacturing plant in the USA — thousands of connected household appliances are produced daily. Each appliance is assigned an IP address, and their progress is tracked using DHCP and Dynamic DNS, which update the central plant management systems continuously.
GE's operations required a sophisticated setup. Every production line has its own DHCP and DNS server to ensure production issues in one area do not affect others. Previously, these services were delivered as a secondary service on standard network switches. However, the existing switches were due to be replaced, and the planned replacements did not include DHCP functionality.
The network team was already using an Infoblox DDI solution to deliver DHCP for their corporate office network. However, sharing the existing system was not feasible. The production operation needed to remain separate to ensure maximum uptime and investing in a duplicate (expensive) solution was impractical.
Plant engineers also wanted central visibility of the DHCP scopes across the entire plant to monitor the systems and quickly identify problematic devices.
The team searched for a dedicated appliance and discovered DNSBOX. It offered the high availability and out-of-the-box ease of use they needed, backed with ApplianSys' world class vendor support.
As well as best of breed DHCP management, their new setup includes handling DNS. It ensures that each production line remains independent while also providing central visibility and control for management:
- One DNSBOX210 per production line allocates IP addresses using DHCP.
- The same appliance provides an authoritative DNS service to allow devices to connect to the internal internet.
- Dynamic DNS allows devices to keep the same IP address as they progress through production.
- All production line DNSBOXes share configuration with a central DNSBOX200 for visibility and high availability.
And with DNSBOX's dual CFast architecture, should there be any system issues, the network team can transfer configuration between appliances and get up and running with an identical system in minutes.
