Anycast for Disaster Recovery

Utilizing anycast, if a server at one location goes down for any reason, traffic can be seamlessly rerouted at the network level to a backup site. This makes anycast an excellent addition to your disaster recovery toolkit.

Let’s say we have an anycasted A+B disaster recovery deployment, where server A is being backed up regularly to server B in an alternate location. Normally, the anycast announcement routes all traffic to server A using one IP address.

However, if server A crashes, is attacked, or is even destroyed in a natural disaster, the anycast announcement can be quickly updated to reroute traffic to server B. Because the IP address doesn’t change, and the rerouting happens at the network level, the impact to end users is minimal.

For businesses that don’t have the capacity for real or near time server synchronization, anycast can be used to minimize business impact in the event of a failure or disaster of any kind in your primary location.