Anycast

For this reason, anycast is generally used as a way to provide high availability and load balancing for stateless services such as access to replicated data; for example, DNS service is a distributed service over multiple geographically dispersed servers.

One of many things I need to learn more about one of these days is Internet infrastructure. For some reason, I'd never heard of 'Anycast' until today, as I was reading up on how Google's new DNS service would work. Interesting stuff in there too about using Anycast as part of the transititon to IPv6.