Anycast DNS is an advanced routing solution that gives customers access to multiple server destinations to share the same IP address, allowing them to route IP requests to the optimal destination based on network conditions.

The new feature aligns itself with SoftLayer's overall network structure approach, which offers two separate and distinct redundant network architectures designed to deliver flexible, enterprise level hosting services.

Other recent developments from SoftLayer that encompass this same approach include its CDNLayer service offering, announced in May, which optimizes the delivery of content using a network of geographically distributed server nodes for storing and streaming material.

More recently, the web host has expanded its software to include virtualization with last month's release of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.

The feature offers many benefits, including service continuity, which helps increase uptime; improved network protection, which provides a full network failover solution and optimizes traffic flow; and disaster recovery, which enables critical services to be continuously maintained.

The service is particularly unique in that it has previously not been available for organizations of all sizes. A geographically diverse routing system is typically built for only enterprises since it is difficult to develop in-house and too costly to purchase from third party providers. 

"We are very excited to offer a high availability DNS solution to the market," says Jacob Linscott, SoftLayer's director of information systems. "Its capabilities give our customers another level of reliability and an effective mechanism for maintaining business continuity."

All three of SoftLayer's data centers offer Anycast DNS routing, while all SoftLayer's resilient name servers have the feature enabled and offer real-time DNS record population.

By allowing multiple destinations to share the same IP address, Anycast DNS routing permits DNS registration information to be mirrored on server clusters either locally, regionally, or globally.

Requests for the IP address are routed to the closest destination with the highest availability, preventing requests from being routed to a server that is unavailable or experiencing unusually heavy traffic.