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FEBRUARY 2007

Volume 4 Number 2

According to a recent survey, the private industry sector in the US believes that the federal government transition to IPv6 will significantly accelerate the development of related commercial technologies. Until recently, neither the government nor industry appeared to have solid motivation to invest in the New Internet; one reason given was a perceived shortage of applications and fully capable network support products. According to the survey, the maturity level of IPv6 products is now expected to increase greatly. This March, the US IPv6 Summit and Coalition Summit for IPv6 hope to harness the momentum being created by the government transition and other initiatives, and provide an exciting new forum for government, industry and international groups to forge unified plans, demonstrate their new products and services and outline their strategies. Since March 26 is coming very soon, we recommend you get discount Hotel Reservations ASAP, and register online now — Early Bird prices are still available: www.usipv6.com. See you there!

This month's 6Sense blends interests in IPv6 applications, security and infrastructure design, with articles from:

• Karl Siil, Chief Architect at Lumeta, writes about the risks in "accidental" adoption of IPv6 technology and how to manage the pitfalls.
  
• Anoop Kohli of Verizon Business gives a great overview of this tier 1 telecom's leadership in IPv6 development and deployment.
  
• Onofrio Schillaci, Global Crossing's Principal Solutions Architect, describes the increasing trends for IPv6 adoption in the wake of telco, ISP and MSO acknowledgments that the advent of the New Internet is finally here — and lists the main reasons why the US is changing its perception of the need for the New Internet.
  
• Tim Rooney, Director of Product Management at INS, offers the first of a three-part series on IPv4-to-IPv6 transition strategies and the dynamics of migrating a network.

Our authors describe not only available products and services for your consideration, but also best practices and experience-borne practical "tips" that could save you tons of time and money. We thank them for taking the time to share their insights with us.

We hope that you enjoy this issue, and will join us in the upcoming Summits in Reston. I look forward to joining you there, and am honored and delighted to be a part of our expanding community.

Respectfully,

Alex Lightman
Publisher, 6Sense Newsletter
CEO, Innofone.com, Inc.
A publicly traded company
OTC BB: IMEN

IPv6 is destined to become the dominant networking protocol, but this won't happen overnight. In fact, the early days of transition, i.e., now, will be fraught with peril. There will be those who leap into IPv6 with both feet, not taking the necessary precautions required with the enterprise-wide adoption of any new technology. There will be those who think they are only putting their toe in the water, only to find that they're up to their necks from a lack of planning and/or understanding the technology's capabilities. What follows is an examination of this author's lessons learned from both studying IPv6 and from running contained (or so he thought, in some cases) implementations of the protocol.

The phrase, "We're not running IPv6" will become the "The check is in the mail" of IP networking, for the next few years, at least. Enterprises that know they must adopt IPv6, e.g., the Federal government, have already completed or will soon complete their transition plans and start execution to meet their June 2008 mandates. What they won't realize is, no matter what dates are on those transition plans for IPv6 adoption, the transition is already well underway. IPv6, both in hardware and software, is already prevalent. To quote Jack Nicholson's Joker, when it comes to acquiring IPv6-capable equipment, organizations will find, "Well that's the gag, folks! Chances are you've bought 'em already!"

Most mainstream network and end devices already support IPv6. These include the routers manufactured by all the major players, along with all the mainstream operating systems. Windows, Linux, Solaris, and a plethora of others have had IPv6 capabilities for some time. Windows Vista, out now, prefers to network using IPv6 out of the box. If a Vista system can find a router with IPv6 interfaces, it will form a network. Vista will likely be a primary driver in making IPv6 a ubiquitous, if not the dominant, networking protocol.

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The OMB directive on upgrading to IPv6 affects not only agencies, but network providers as well. Verizon Business is fully committed to supporting the new IPv6 protocol, while continuing to evolve and modernize its IPv4 capabilities.

Verizon Business has been involved in the development of IPv6 since 1998, when then-MCI provided an experimental IPv6 service for the National Science Foundation. In 2002, the company offered Internet Exchange IPv6 peering service at the MAE-West peering location. In 2004, we offered global public IPv6 Internet service over the UUNet backbone and participated in Moonv6 interoperability testing.

Today, Verizon Business offers native IPv6 service on its nationwide vBNS+ backbone. This service, available to federal agencies, can be ordered as IPv4, IPv6 or dual stack IPv4/IPv6. The vBNS+ backbone was designed for federal agencies to have a secure IP backbone with no external gateways, thus making it a private backbone. The backbone is MPLS-enabled, providing communication at the IP protocol layer, natively. The vBNS+ IP backbone provides standard based Layer 3 VPN service based on RFC-2547.

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Despite its astronomically larger address space, little interest in adopting IPv6 has been shown in the five years since its standardization. Network Address Translation (NAT) and deployment of private IPv4 addresses have slowed the depletion of IPv4 addresses while IPv6 was being developed. In fact, NAT was so effective in slowing the rate of IPv4 address allocation that in many quarters – particularly in the United States – doubt grew over whether transitioning to IPv6 would ever be necessary. It seems that doubt was unwarranted and the trend toward network convergence has rekindled the need for IPv6.

We think there are three reasons for this:

• Planned services and devices: The intention to provide a wide array of IP services to a vast number of customers, plus plans for perhaps billions of new network-enabled devices from mobile phones to home appliances to entertainment systems, will create a demand for IP addresses that IPv4 cannot meet.
• Multiple service profiles to a single location: Multi-service offerings to a home or office will require varying levels of quality and security. In your home, you might be having a telephone conversation, while your spouse is conducting a video conference with clients, your daughter is watching a movie, and your son is playing a video game – all over the same IP connection from the same service provider. If these multiple applications require different levels of quality and security, they cannot work together through a NAT device. And, if NAT is taken out of the picture, the conservation of IP addresses is undermined.
• New markets: The expansion of service offerings to existing customers by itself represents a big demand for new IP addresses. When developing regions of the world with enormous populations and rapidly expanding economies – China and India being prime examples – are taken into account, IPv4 becomes entirely insufficient. The population of the People's Republic of China alone – some 1.3 billion people – is larger than the number of remaining, unallocated IPv4 addresses.

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Organizations with existing IPv4 networks seeking to implement IPv6 face challenges in identifying impacts, planning the transition, and executing the migration to IPv6. Given organizations’ reliance on external communications for partner links, home-based employees, and Internet access for email, web browsing, etc., an overall plan should be compiled addressing the current environment, end users, and the controlled steps to IPv6 deployment.

This article, excerpted from a white paper of the same name, will be presented over the next three issues of 6Sense, and will review the three primary migration technologies that can be used to transition from an IPv4 network to an IPv6 network: (1) dual stack, (2) tunneling, and (3) translation. This article deals with dual stack.

Click here to download our IPv6 Toolkit, which includes the full IPv4-to-IPv6 Transition Strategies white paper in addition to webinars on IPv6 management.

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v6 Transition, a subsidiary of Innofone.com, Inc. offers a wide range of IPv6 support services for your organization. Our team of companies can help you with your IPv6 plans, whether they involve transitioning your network to a v6 configuration or developing and financing products or services for the upcoming market boom precipitated by the New Internet.

MORE INFO

Publisher's Intro

IPv6 Adoption Risks and Pitfalls
Karl A. Siil
Lumeta Corporation

IPv6 - The Time is Now
Anoop Kohli
Verizon Business

Shifting Trends in IPv6 Adoption
Onofrio ("Norm") Schillaci
Global Crossing

IPv4-to-IPv6 Transition Strategies
(Part 1 of 3)
Tim Rooney
INS

v6 Transition Offers IPv6 Support Services

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