IPv6 RU Ready?

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  Tuesday 28 June 2011

  By: Dan O'Donnell
  
  I have been using these texting acronyms when communicating with my high school daughter thinking I was being very current and cool using their language. “ru ready?” “im here” and so on. Well I was shocked when she told me the other day, “no one uses those terms anymore; everyone has keyboards and can type in English.” Of course, she was referring to their smart phones. Oh well, I thought, technology!
  
  That “everyone” has a smart phone is a key driver for the movement to IPv6. The proliferation of devices with IP addresses including mobile devices, laptops and tablets is exhausting the available pool of IPv4 addresses. This change will eventually have a profound effect on networks. Here are some interesting numbers:
  
  IPv4 allows for a pool of about four billion addresses. IPv6, using a 128-bit address supports 3.4 x 1038 addresses. Now, for you trivia experts, the number is called 340 undecillion. To further amaze and bedazzle your friends over a cocktail, here is the number of addresses available in IPv6: 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456. You will need a big cocktail napkin to write that down.
  
  So what does this mean for your network? Today, not much. Less than 1% of internet traffic consists of IPv6 and most devices today do not support IPv6. However, planning for the inevitable change is happening now. It is time to start getting familiar with the new format and asking your vendors for their IPv6 evolution plan. Ipv4 and IPv6 do not play well together but they can coexist. Some high routers, called “dual stack” routers can support both IPv4 and IPv6.
  
  We are in for a long slow trudge as this transition develops. However, with the broad acceptance of tablets and smart phones coupled with the ubiquitous rollout of LTE networks, what looks like a slow trudge now could turn into a brisk run very soon.
  
  Now that you know about the network address changes, be sure not to overlook your network support infrastructure in your planning. What about your probes that analyze packets and provide critical information about what is going on in your network? What about your network protection appliances such as IPS/IDS and DLP? What about your CEM appliances? All these tools are invaluable to your network operation. What about the TAPS that are used to connect these tools to your network, aggregate and filter link data before passing it to the appliances? Will your TAPs and other access switches pass IPv6? Can they aggregate and filter on IPv6?
  
  Be sure to understand how all the equipment that touches your IPv4 packets will transition to the new world of IPv6. Smart phones quickly changed the way my daughter communicates with her friends. They will also be responsible for many important changes in your network design. It seems far in the future but as a prominent CEO once said, “Technology is measured in dog years.”
  
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