VeriSign Inc is to deploy a domain name system server constellation in Beijing under a deal with the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry, the company said yesterday. The constellation is expected to see the server go live later this year.

The constellation, VeriSign's second in Asia after a deal in Korea last year, will sit at the top of the DNS hierarchy in China, handling all .com and .net requests, and pointing top-level domain lookups to their respective servers.

The Beijing deployment will be another mirror of the 'J' root server, a spokesperson said. VeriSign operates A and J root servers. A has a single instance in Virginia, while J is mirrored in five US states, London, Stockholm, Amsterdam and Korea. There are 13 logical internet root servers, each with its own IP address, but five of them have mirrors in other locations to provide redundancy and therefore more security to the internet. The Internet Systems Consortium's F-root, for example, has 18 instances.