IPv6 News

The IPv6 Forum Ready Logo Program Committee releases a new program: the IPv6 Education Certification Logo Program. This program defines and certifies courses, engineers and trainers with Silver & Gold Logo levels and requires IPv6 implementation on the web site of the education program.

A recent survey on IPv6 training and studies at universities and vendors has demonstrated that IPv6 training and courses are way too embryonic to have any critical impact. It is estimated that some 20 million engineers are working on the current Internet worldwide at ISPs, corporate and all other public and private organizations and they will need quality training on IPv6.

More at the IPv6 Forum.

IPv6 a major catalyst for billions of dollars worth of deals? The Intel announcement of their McAfee purchase for 7.7 billion seems to indicate as much when Dave DeWalt , McAfee CEO is quoted as saying during a conference call; "If we look at the transition from IPv4 to IPv6, we're seeing an explosion of billions of devices and they all need to be secured." Then he continues by saying "The embedded market is a very specific and high-opportunity market for us." His estimate is that the number of connected devices will grow from one billion to 50 billion within 10 years.
Complete info at CircleID.

David Holder is to speak at this year’s Storage Developer Conference in Santa Clara. Erion has a long history of working to IPv6 enable networked storage solutions and in particular the Open Source Samba implementation of the CIFS/SMB protocols. This year, Dr Holder plans to give a presentation on how to IPv6 enabled storage applications. The full abstract is below.

IPv6 Enabling CIFS/SMB Applications

Today IPv6 is no longer the protocol of the future, it is being extensively deployed in production networks. The central pool of IPv4 addresses will be exhausted in 2010 to 2011. As a result, Governments and organisations world-wide have been mandating its use for a number of years. As a CIFS/SMB developer, the time has come where you can no longer ignore IPv6.

IPv6 is the default protocol in all major operating systems, including Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7. CIFS and Active Directory have had support for IPv6 for a number of years.

This paper will address the key issues facing CIFS/SMB developers when migrating their applications to IPv6. It will provide a review of the status of IPv6 in Samba and Windows and describe how CIFS/SMB applications should be migrated to IPv6. This presentation will also include a brief IPv6 API and porting tutorial presenting the key things that developers need to know about IPv6 and the IPv6 socket API in order to effectively use IPv6 in their applications.

Dr David Holder is closely involved in the migration of Samba to IPv6. He has worked with IPv6 for well over a decade and is a regular speaker at global IPv6 conferences.

Traditional host discovery via network scanning won't work with IPv6, but alternative methods are available.
Complete info at DarkReading.

Next-generation IP protocol comes with more security as well as some potential flaws of its own.
Complete info at DarkReadiong and InformationWeek.

Sydney might have hosted the 'best ever' Olympic Games back in 2000, but Microsoft Tech.Ed 2010 held last week on the Gold Coast was the best ever as far as the event's technology manager Jorke Odolphi is concerned.
Complete info at ITWire.

IPv6 a major catalyst for billions of dollars worth of deals? The Intel announcement of their McAfee purchase for 7.7 billion seems to indicate as much when Dave DeWalt , McAfee CEO is quoted as saying during a conference call; "If we look at the transition from IPv4 to IPv6, we're seeing an explosion of billions of devices and they all need to be secured." Then he continues by saying "The embedded market is a very specific and high-opportunity market for us." His estimate is that the number of connected devices will grow from one billion to 50 billion within 10 years.

In the meantime Baltimore Gas and Electricity (BGE) signed a contract for the provision of IPv6 based smart readers to equip their 1.2 million customers using a 'secure, end-to-end IPv6 platform for BGE to deliver on operational benefits today while also ensuring tomorrow's energy challenges can be met with a scalable and open platform'.

The same day , September 1st, we see Cisco and Itron sign a strategic agreement to 'develop a standards-based, highly secure technology for full IPv6 implementation of field area communications to support smart metering, intelligent distribution automation and interfaces to the customer premise '.

One day later, september 2nd, Cisco announces the purchase of Archrock, a pioneer of IPv6 implementation for sensor network and smart grids , cofounder of IPSO , the alliance promoting IP for small objects, and strong proponent of the IETF 6lowpan recommendation which defines the use of IPv6 for low powered objects.

There is definitely an IPv6 smell in the air these late summer days. 

Written by Yves Poppe, Director, Business Development IP Strategy

Verizon Business posted a news release encouraging US CIOs to investigate IPv6. It also released a video podcast.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of the transition to IPv6 -- the consumer broadband market -- still lies ahead of most service providers, and they need to get moving, according to Cisco Systems Inc.
Complete info at LightReading.

Over two days, Cisco Systems bolstered its smart grid efforts by partnering with Itron and buying Arch Networks.
Complete info at eWeek and ZDNet.