Companies need a way to ensure the reliability and availability of their web-based operations that doesn’t require major investments in network infrastructure.
Using Hybrid Routing
Although many domain operators choose anycast routing because it accelerates DNS resolution by minimising transaction latency, the use of anycast alone implies a trade-off between performance and availability.
Many domain operators would be better served by a hybrid solution, where some smaller number of name servers within a zone is anycasted, while the remaining servers are unicasted. This approach helps minimise transactional latency while optimising the availability of the relevant zones.
Identifying the intersecting “sweet spot” in hybrid deployments, where the number of unicast and anycast authoritative name servers is ideally optimised, is complex and influenced by many local and systemic variables.
GUIDELINES FOR OPTIMISING RESOLUTION
| Goal | Verisign Recommendation |
|---|---|
| Maximise resolution and availability | Maximise performance and minimise latency. |
| Minimise failures in anycast environments | Use anycasted name servers plus one or more unicasted servers. When placing unicasted servers, consider the demographics of querying recursive name servers; that is, place unicasted servers close to your data centre, your customers or both. |
| Use only anycasted name servers | Ensure that the name servers specified for a domain are unique anycast announcements. Do not allow all specified name servers to go to all available nodes. In addition, ensure that authoritative servers for a zone do not share a common footprint; otherwise, if one node goes down, all name servers may fail. Alternatively, utilise two discrete unicast servers. |
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