[dns-operations] DNS zone without an SOA or NS records

[Chuck Anderson]

Is it valid to have a DNS zone that serves only A records, but does
not contain any SOA or NS recods?

Isilon (a network storage appliance) apparently does this and wants a
DNS delegation to it to handle the built-in load-balancing/failover
that it does.

e.g. if you have a zone example.com, and you want to serve files from
the Isilon device with a name of files.example.com, then Isilon wants
you to put this in example.com:

$ORIGIN example.com.
files     IN NS files-sip.example.com.
files-sip IN A  192.168.1.100

But when you try to query 192.168.1.100, no answers are returned for
SOA or NS--only A queries are responded to.

Is that compliant with DNS standards (I think not)?  If not, can
someone please point me to the relevant standard where is says there
must be an SOA and NS record?

More importantly, what are the ramifications of not having any SOA or
NS records in the zone?

Thanks