Yesterday I gave a talk to Sheffield GeekUp on preparing enterprises for IPv6 [download]. The premise of the talk was :
- IPv4 addresses are scarse, and at current consumption rates, the IANA pool of free v4 addresses will be gone at the start of 2011.
- This starts a “Post IPv4 world” where the IPv4 internet continues to function as before (certainly initially), but obtaining new addresses becomes harder and expensive. This inhibits expansion of existing firms, and new entrants to the market.
- Address trading is likely to lead to a larger routing table, meaning that failure-recovery times increase, and the risk of blackholes on the internet increases.
- Large broadband providers may not have enough v4 addresses to give one address per customer. This means protocol translation techniques need to be used, which break the end to end model. We rely on the end to end model when innovating new services on the internet.
- If services and consumers gradually roll v4 and v6 (dual stack), the negative impact of markets for addresses, routing problems, and translation can be mitigated.
- Service providers are enabling v6 in the core. Enterprises need to move next in order to get the world v6 ready.
The advice I gave was :
- Today’s market leaders are already learning v6 lessons in their labs, (e.g. ipv6.google.com). They are doing this to help them retain market leadership. If you want to retain your market position, start labbing your applications and service provision with v6.
- Write a policy stating all new purchases of infrastructure and services need to be from providers with v6 support, or a well defined v6 road map. In other words, make v6 a “life cycle upgrade”.
- Share information, and learn information from your industry peers.
- I also listed some advice to developers with regard to v4 and v6 differences.
- I then delivered a very quick primer to those who have not seen v6 deployed before.
My hope is that this talk is improved upon and delivered internationally to enterprises.