CZ.NIC is further strengthening the anycast DNS of the .CZ zone by launching a site in South Africa

The connection of CZ.NIC DNS servers to the oldest peering node in Africa, which is the Johannesburg Internet Exchange (JINX), should help improve availability and reduce query latency not only for the .CZ domain, but also for the partner domains hosted by CZ.NIC.

The CZ.NIC Association, the Czech national domain administrator, has set up a new foreign site in Johannesburg, South Africa, which now features new servers with 22Gbps throughput. This is the first physical site on the continent and the establishment of this site is a step in the gradual strengthening of the robustness of the anycast DNS of the .CZ zone distributed evenly around the world. The connection of CZ.NIC DNS servers to the oldest peering node in Africa, which is the Johannesburg Internet Exchange (JINX), should help improve availability and reduce query latency not only for the .CZ domain, but also for the partner domains hosted by CZ.NIC.

“With the launch of the Johannesburg node, we continue to expand our DNS infrastructure and add another, thirteenth, site outside the Czech Republic where we operate our anycast DNS. These sites are not chosen randomly. Thanks to our colleagues from the ADAM project, we are able to analyze DNS traffic data and determine which location will be the most beneficial for building a new DNS node. Now, most of the traffic from Africa will no longer have to be handled in Europe,” said Ondřej Filip, CEO of the CZ.NIC Association.

In addition to the three locations in the Czech Republic, CZ.NIC runs its servers in 12 other countries. In Europe, these are nodes in Austria (Vienna), Germany (Frankfurt am Main), the UK (London), Sweden (Stockholm), Italy (Milan) and Slovakia (Bratislava). In the US, the Association operates one node in a data center in Reston (in cooperation with ICANN) and, since 2021, also in the LINX NoVA peering center, with additional servers located on the West Coast (Seattle). In South America, it is Brazil (São Paulo) and Chile (Santiago de Chile). In Asia, the Association operates DNS servers in Japan (Tokyo) and also in Singapore (Singapore).