BIND version 9 is a major rewrite of nearly all aspects of the underlying
BIND architecture. This re-architecting of BIND was necessitated by the
expected demands of:

	- Domain name system growth, particularly in very large
	  zones such as .COM
	- Protocol enhancements necessary to securely query and
	  update zones
	- Protocol enhancements necessary to take advantage of
	  certain architectural features of IP version 6

These demands implied performance requirements that were not necessarily
easy to attain with the BIND version 8 architecture.  In particular, BIND
must not only be able to run on multi-processor multi-threaded systems,
but must take full advantage of the performance enhancements these
architectures can provide. In addition, the underlying data storage
architecture of BIND version 8 does not lend itself to implementing
alternative back end databases, such as would be desirable for the support
of multi-gigabyte zones. As such zones are easily foreseeable in the
relatively near future, the data storage architecture needed revision. The
feature requirements for BIND version 9 included:

	- Scalability
		Thread safety
	        Multi-processor scalability
	        Support for very large zones

	- Security
	        Support for DNSSEC
	        Support for TSIG
	        Auditability (code and operation)
	        Firewall support (split DNS)

	- Portability

	- Maintainability

	- Protocol Enhancements
	        IXFR, DDNS, Notify, EDNS0
	        Improved standards conformance

	- Operational enhancements
	        High availability and reliability
	        Support for alternative back end databases

	- IP version 6 support
	        IPv6 resource records (A6, DNAME, etc.)
	        Bitstring labels
	        APIs

BIND version 9 development has been underwritten by the following
organizations:

        Sun Microsystems, Inc.
        Hewlett Packard
        Compaq Computer Corporation
        IBM
        Process Software Corporation
        Silicon Graphics, Inc.
        Network Associates, Inc.
        U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency
	USENIX Association
	Stichting NLnet - NLnet Foundation

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