CloudfloorDNS Blog

11-6-2017 – CloudfloorDNS awarded US patent on Performance/Distance based Load Balancing

By: Eric McIntyre, Sr. Director of DNS Business Development at CloudfloorDNS

US Patent on GEO DNS, Performance Load Balancing

We’re pleased to show off our shiny new US Patent on performance & location based DNS Load Balancing.  This is a big deal to us – it’s something that has been in the US Patent system for almost 6 years.   This patent is a combination of hard work by a handful of talented people here at CloudfloorDNS and our parent company Everbridge. Why is this patent important?   The patent, US# US20130297596 A1 details “systems and methods for performance based load balancing” and covers our unique combination of both performance testing (monitoring servers for latency, uptime) and our GEO DNS and DNS Failover services.   This combination of global monitoring and our Anycast DNS network coupled with advanced DNS-based services offer the the best possible performance and reliability for any online business.

US Patent on GEO DNS & Load Balancing

Cloudfloor and Everbridge showing off their new US Patent

How our customers utilize these services:

GEO DNS – Geographically Balancing & Prioritizing Unified Communications

A growing number of clients are utilizing our GEO DNS to hand back DNS SRV records to the fastest/closest server to their end-users and/or employees.  SRV records are a type of DNS resource record method to supply a list of records to the unified communications clients (VOIP, CHAT, VOICECHAT, etc) and offer port, hostname, weight and priority with redundancy built in – much like MX (Mail) Records. When an organization has a global presence, they need these servers distributed across the globe to help reduce latency and provide the best possible video/chat/VOIP call quality. Our GEO DNS hands back the DNS SRV Records for the closest regional server allowing for the ultimate in reliability and quality of service for your Unified Communications platforms such as Cisco Unified Communications (CUCM, Cisco Express) and others.

VOIP Monitoring & Failover – Providing the best possible call quality to your users

VOIP services are growing by leaps and bounds and excellent call quality and service reliability is paramount for any VOIP and UCaaS provider.  They need to deliver a high availability solution with the lowest possible latency knowing that outages and poor call quality can destroy a business overnight!  Our SIP Options (VOIP) monitoring and DNS Failover offer a simple and easy way to provide load balancing, monitoring and uptime to your critical VOIP infrastructure.   Our global monitoring check’s your servers using the SIP Options protocol, detects latency or failure and fails over to backups instantly.

These are just a few of the many ways our expertise in performance and distance-based (GEO) DNS and related services are helping organizations provide more reliable & consistent services to their clients.  If you think we may be able to help your online business, please contact a Cloudfloor DNS expert