What are the benefits of Anycast DNS?
| Increased Reliability |
Anycast improves reliability of DNS through the placement of multiple geographically dispersed servers at the same IP address. The redundancy of these DNS servers makes the service more highly available and reliable. |
| Load Balancing |
Dynamic layer 3 routing of Anycast IP Addresses will effectively load balance DNS queries especially over equal cost route paths. |
| Improved Performance |
Packets destined for Anycast DNS servers will be routed to the "nearest" server in the topology. This helps ensure that DNS clients are querying their local servers first before using remote servers based upon routing and topology. |
| Enhanced Security |
Geographically dispersed DNS servers that operate using the same IP address makes the DNS service more resilient to DoS and/or DDoS attacks because its much tougher to launch attacks on hosts that use duplicated IP address schemes that reside in different parts of the network. |
| Localized Impact of DoS Attacks |
Successfully launched DoS and/or DDoS attacks will typically be localized and only affect a portion of the entire Anycast DNS group. |
| Simplified Client Configuration |
Anycast DNS can dramatically simplify the configuration of all DNS client resolvers. It's possible to use the same nameserver IP Addresses for ALL DNS client resolvers. Configuring DHCP templates for dynamically configured hosts, as well as, imaging or hand-configuring static configured IP clients would be dramatically simplified. |
| Increased Availability | A DNS Anycast server that becomes unavailable due to failure or routine maintenance will have very little impact on name resolution service because the service routes are withdrawn from the routing tables. Routing will divert this traffic to new alternate best path servers in the Anycast group. |
