Today we announced that OpenDNS has brought new datacenters online in Prague, Copenhagen, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw and Bucharest, effectively tripling our presence in Europe. Over the past few years the OpenDNS operations team has added datacenters in Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Singapore. It’s a big event for our team, and ramping up involves weeks of planning, coordinating with remote sites, drop-shipping gear, a series of performance tests, and intense monitoring. So, you can imagine my excitement when we decided that our first big project after announcing our recent round of Series B funding was to bring six datacenters online – at the same time.
Our newer sites are strategic locations in key buildings hosting Internet exchanges, which allows us to peer directly with networks that use OpenDNS. Peering is a big factor when we’re deciding where to open a datacenter, as it gives us the ability to connect directly to other organizations. Network latency is very important for our service and this helps brings our service as close to the user as we can get without installing equipment on their network.
The new datacenters bring OpenDNS’s services closer to millions of European users, many have already reported increases in speed and performance. Like all of our datacenters, these six new locations in Europe will leverage Anycast technology. Our line of Umbrella security services is seeing massive global adoption, and Anycast technology is a huge part of what makes the service so reliable and fast for customers around the world.
A quick refresher on how Anycast works: OpenDNS automatically routes your requests to the the datacenter that’s geographically closest to you. So, say for example you’re traveling in Hong Kong but your corporate headquarters is in New York. Instead of routing your request back to HQ, OpenDNS will route it to our Hong Kong datacenter, giving you a dramatically improved Internet experience.
OpenDNS, which still reports zero downtime since our launch in 2006, and transparently shares network performance details on our website, now resolves a whopping 50 billion DNS queries daily. We’re planning on continuing our global expansion strategy throughout 2013.
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