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Meet NetActuate at All Things Open 2025 in Raleigh Oct 13-14!
BGP anycast supports both IPv4 and IPv6. Using anycast with IPv6 can further improve performance, reliability, and address scalability.
Companies face challenges migrating from IPv4 to IPv6 due to compatibility, cost, and operational complexity. Legacy systems, applications, and security tools often lack full IPv6 support, requiring dual-stack configurations that increase management overhead. Network teams need retraining, and inconsistent vendor support complicates deployment. Additionally, ensuring end-to-end visibility, security policies, and performance parity across both protocols remains difficult during the transition.
Companies can leverage Anycast to simplify and accelerate their transition from IPv4 to IPv6 by using it as a unified delivery mechanism across both protocol versions. Anycast allows multiple servers—supporting either or both IP families—to share the same advertised IP address, with traffic automatically routed to the nearest or healthiest node based on network topology.
By deploying dual-stack Anycast nodes, organizations can provide seamless IPv4 and IPv6 accessibility during migration, avoiding the need for complex translation gateways or user-visible configuration changes.
Anycast also improves resilience and performance, automatically distributing traffic load and providing geographic redundancy. As IPv6 adoption grows, companies can progressively reduce IPv4 nodes without disrupting service. Additionally, using Anycast simplifies DNS and security deployments—like WAFs, VPN gateways, or SIEM collectors—under a single, protocol-agnostic endpoint.
IPv6, or Internet Protocol version 6, is the newest version of the Internet Protocol (IP). The IP is a core set of rules that help regulate how data is transmitted and received over the internet. It is a foundational part of any internet service. IP provides the information needed, such device addresses and routing information, that allow data packets to travel from one device to another across a network.
An IP address is a number that is assigned to a device on a network. An IPv4 address is made up of a 32-bit numerical label consisting of four sets of numbers separated by dots. Each set can have a value between 0 and 255. However, there can only be so many unique IPv4 addresses, leading to a shortage of IPv4 addresses. This led to the creation of IPv6 addressing. IPv6 addresses are much longer, using a 128-bit numerical label. The possible combinations of IPv6 addresses is far larger allowing for more devices to be connected to the internet and larger networks to be built.
You can use BGP anycast with both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. With anycast, you can make multiple, distributed resources from a single IPv6 anycast address. One IPv6 address can belong to different nodes in a global footprint, and with anycast, incoming traffic is routed to the location nearest to them on the network.
Deploy across 45+ global locations on one of the world’s largest networks, engineered for performance, resiliency, and efficient scaling without the risk of downtime or runaway costs.
