OpenDNS, the award-winning DNS service that makes the Internet safer, faster, smarter and more reliable, today announced the Salvation Army is using OpenDNS at all Canadian locations for more than 3,000 people connecting to the Internet through its network. Salvation Army is an international non-profit organization with locations in more than 100 countries around the world. OpenDNS is the world's largest, fastest-growing DNS service.
The Salvation Army was plagued by slow Web page load times and annoying intermittent Internet outages. Frustrated with the situation, and in need of fast DNS lookups to function optimally and provide much need help via the Internet, the organization sought to identify the cause of the problem.
"In the past we used 'Open Root Server Consortium' servers, and found that some of the servers would go offline with no warning," said Robert Miller, Network Administrator for the Salvation Army. "Lookups were very slow, and our users were complaining about how slow our network was. We were confused, because running bandwidth tests showed we were under-utilized."
"During troubleshooting, we determined that the problem was slow response from our ISPs DNS servers, so we switched to OpenDNS," he continued. "We've had not a single problem since switching to OpenDNS, and it's much faster than our ISP's DNS servers. I would estimate that the response is better than 10 times faster than that of our ISP."
The Salvation Army has OpenDNS configured as a forwarder on all of its WAN site DNS servers, firewalls and even as secondaries in its DHCP configurations for clients. Miller says he recommends OpenDNS to everyone, especially system administrators like himself.
"Our experience with OpenDNS has been nothing short of excellent," said Miller. "This is the kind of service that we would expect from our ISP, who charges us for our connections. We'd even pay for OpenDNS -- it's already proved its value."
About Salvation Army Canada:
The Salvation Army was founded in Canada in 1882, just fifteen years after Confederation. From the beginning, the Army's goal was simple -- to provide spiritual and practical support to society's most vulnerable. Among various service innovations, The Salvation Army was instrumental, in its early years, in developing the first prisoner parole system and the first Juvenile Detention facility in Canada. The Army was also an early provider of shelter and service to women in crisis and served alongside the Canadian Armed Forces during the Great War and World War II. The Salvation Army continues its critical work to this day, giving direct, compassionate, hands-on service to 1.5 million people each year and restoring hope and dignity to those who might otherwise remain invisible in society.
About OpenDNS:
OpenDNS makes the Internet safer, faster, smarter and more reliable. Based in San Francisco, the company operates a large distributed network that powers a new kind of recursive DNS (Domain Name System) service that provides all Internet users increased security, reliability and performance. OpenDNS is thoroughly committed to building and operating the best DNS platform in the world and to improving the Internet.