IPv6 News

The business case for Internet service providers to shift to a dual stack architecture is one word, a conference was told: Survival.
Complete info at ITWorldCanada.

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I am sure it is old news to most if not all of Science 2.0’s readers that NASA recruited Vint Cerf to help adapt Internet technology to space mission communications in 2000; and that they successfully tested a new protocol in 2008. I have no doubt that the engineers can put together a pretty reliable interplanetary network.
Complete info at Science20.

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Support for IPv6 has grown by almost 20 times in the past year by one measure, but most websites still can’t be reached without IPv4, the current Internet Protocol, which is near running out of unclaimed addresses.
Complete info at PCWorld, CIO and ITWorld.

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Network World has assembled a collection of world-class IPv6 experts in New York On December 13 to help you plan your migration.
Complete info at NetworkWorld.

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The percentage of zones under .com, .net and .org that support IPv6 has increased by 1,900% over the past 12 months according to a new census conducted by the Measurement Factory, sponsored by Infoblox. According to the census, this dramatic increase can be primarily attributed to the introduction of support of IPv6 by a single domain name registrar, Go Daddy.
Complete article at CircleID.

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Popular IPv6 certification program will now be accessible to Czech speaking audience.
Complete info at MarketWatch, MyHostNews and Sys-Con.

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Infoblox Inc. today announced results of an IPv6 Census conducted by the Measurement Factory and sponsored by Infoblox. The census revealed that the percentage of zones under .com, .net and .org that support IPv6 has increased by 1,900% over the past 12 months. According to the census, this dramatic increase can be primarily attributed to the introduction of support of IPv6 by a single registrar, Go Daddy.
Complete info at FierceTelecom, SunHerald and Bradenton.

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Often when looking at IPv6 deployment statistics, the size of the organisation or the network is not taken into account. In this article, we look at IPv6 deployment of Local Internet Registries (LIRs) per country in correlation to the size of the LIR.

When looking at IPv6 deployment at the LIR level, we can look at the following two metrics:

• The percentage of LIRs that have IPv6 address space (currently at 47%) and;
• What percentage of LIRs has IPv6 address space that is visible in the global routing table (currently at 29%).

What these numbers don’t take into account is the sizes of the LIRs. For billing purposes, LIRs are divided into size categories based on the IP address space they hold and a number of other factors. We used these size categories when producing statistics such as these. Taking this one step further we can use the size of the LIRs as a weight to normalise deployment metrics. We took the total IPv4 address space held by an LIR as a good indication for the LIR’s size, and took a fresh look at IPv6 deployment metrics taking LIR size into account.

We used “treemaps” to visualise this. In the images below, each country is represented by a rectangle. The size of these rectangles is based on the number of IPv4 addresses in the country. Each of these country rectangles is again divided into smaller rectangles, each of those representing one LIR. The size of the LIR’s rectangles is based on the amount of the IPv4 address space held by this LIR.

The light green rectangles represent LIRs that have an IPv6 allocation or assignment, while the black rectangles represent LIRs without IPv6 address space. Note that there are some dark green rectangles. Those represent LIRs that we know will receive IPv6 addresses from another LIR belonging to the same organisation.

In the treemap in Figure 2, light green rectangles represent LIRs that have IPv6 address space visible in the global routing table, while the black rectangles represent LIRs that have IPv6 address space that isn’t yet routed.

If we look at this numerically, we see that 47% of all LIRs hold IPv6 address space. If we weigh in the size of the LIR (as described above), this is even higher: 81%. In other words: 81% of IPv4 address space in the RIPE NCC service region is held by an LIR that also holds IPv6 address space (note: This doesn’t take into account those organisations that maintain multiple LIRs with one of them holding IPv6 space — the dark green fields in Figure 1).

If we look at the underlying numbers of Figure 2, we can see that 29% of LIRs have one or more IPv6 prefixes visible in the global routing table. When we apply the weighting this becomes 63%. In other words: 63% of IPv4 address space in the RIPE NCC service region is with an LIR that holds IPv6 address space that is also routed.

Having 81% of IPv4 address space with LIRs that also took the first step in deploying IPv6 is an encouraging sign. But it is in stark contrast with statistics showing IPv6 deployment at End User sites (0.39% according to Google, roughly 2% at www.ripe.net), or statistics showing IPv6 traffic (0.3% at AMS-IX). This shows that a large majority of IPv4 address space holders in the RIPE NCC service region have taken the first steps but the work towards full dual-stack deployment, and later an IPv6-only network, is far from finished.

Please refer to the background article on RIPE Labs: Interesting Graph – IPv6 per LIR.

Written by Mirjam Kuehne

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BlueCat Networks, the IPAM Intelligence™ company, today announced a strategic partnership with Computacenter, Europe’s leading independent provider of IT infrastructure services, to provide IP Address Management, DNS and DHCP solutions to commercial and government organizations throughout Germany.

“German organizations face considerable challenges in managing an ever-growing number of mobile devices on their networks including tablets and smart phones,” said Reinhard Stüwe, Business Unit Manager, Security, Computacenter Germany. “They also face pressure to reduce network management costs and successfully deploy virtualization and clouds. BlueCat Networks’ scalable, easy-to-use IP Address Management solutions will help our clients address these challenges, as well as implement and manage new technologies like IPv6. We selected BlueCat Networks as our IP Address Management vendor of choice based on the strength of their cloud-ready technology and the stability of their organization both locally and globally. BlueCat Networks is a recognized leader in IP Address Management and this is an ideal partnership that will enhance our portfolio of network management products and cloud-based services.”

“Organizations are beginning to realize that successful virtualization and cloud computing initiatives are IP-dependent and must be built from the IP address up,” said Paul Couturier, VP, Sales, Europe, BlueCat Networks. “IP Address Management is critical for simplifying and automating IP infrastructure and core network services. Our strategic relationship with Computacenter will help us meet the growing demand for IPAM in the important German market where Computacenter’s network solutions and services have been particularly well received.”

BlueCat Networks’ appliance-based software solutions provide a purpose-built platform for IP Address Management (IPAM) and DNS/DHCP core services. Deployed at some of the most demanding and secure organizations in the world, BlueCat Networks’ physical and virtual appliances help public and private sector organizations improve security, lower costs and increase IT efficiency. BlueCat Networks’ solutions also allow organizations to securely manage change and growth with unsurpassed scalability and future-ready support for IPv6 and DNSSEC. For a free trial of BlueCat Networks’ IPAM solution, visit http://pages.bluecatnetworks.com/FreeTrial.

About Computacenter

Computacenter is Europe’s leading independent provider of IT infrastructure services. The company can advise customers on their IT strategy, implement the most appropriate technology from a wide range of leading vendors and manage their technology infrastructures on their behalf. At every stage Compuatcenter make its customers’ businesses sharper by removing cost, complexity and barriers to change across their IT infrastructures.

Compuatcenter’s corporate and government clients are served by offices across the UK, Germany, France, the Benelux countries, Spain and South Africa. It also serves its customers’ global requirements through its extensive partner network. For more information, visit: http://www.computacenter.com.

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Virtualization of core network services such as DDI has created a lot of controversy over the last couple of years. Perhaps most notably, Infoblox and Gartner have been both claiming that virtualized network services are not on the agenda of larger organizations, nor will they ever be. I’m not sure I have ever seen a convincing technological reasoning for this position. Rather, the logic has always been circular: it’s not going to happen because we’re not seeing it happening.

That reminds me about the sovereign debt crisis that has been all rage for the last couple of months. Everyone reading the news knew that the budget deficits and the government debt levels were ballooned to unforeseen levels in the Western world during the financial crisis of 2008-2009. Yet most governments and mainstream economists didn’t see that as a big deal. After all, if there really was a problem, they surely would have seen it. Inertia aside, I think there is a rather interesting connect between the sovereign debt crisis and the next generation of network implementations.

When looking at which organizations are spending the most money on information technology, Western governments come pretty high up on the rankings. For example, the US government has an annual IT budget of roughly 80 billion US dollars, which is an extremely high number when you compare it to for example Microsoft’s annual sales of roughly 70 billion US dollars per year. Once Western governments start looking at ways to cut costs, there is a very good chance information technology budgets will go under scrutiny.

In fact, there is already an ample body of evidence of this happening. Governments around the world are embracing cloud computing initiatives in order to reduce the inflated expense in information technology. The Cloud First Mandate issued by the US Federal Government about a year ago is a prime example of this trend, with the goal of reducing the IT budget by 25% through consolidation. And while the US Federal Government is obviously the eight hundred-pound gorilla as far as IT expenditure is concerned, also the smaller monkeys in the sovereign zoo are looking for ways to shed the extra fat they have accumulated during their debt-financed banana extravaganza. And in this particular diet, the savings will be realized by doing more with less, a proposition that is at the core of virtualized and cloud-based computing.

Due to inertia, it will of course take a while before the consolidation train is charging ahead at full steam. But once we get beyond the tipping point, I think two things will happen. First, organizations will not stop their virtualization and clouding initiatives at applications, but rather continue all the way to core network services such as DDI as well as software-based routing. Second, the new consolidated computing environments will include IPv6 support as a standard feature in order to protect the investments that have been made. Given the spending power most Western governments still do enjoy, I would expect this trend to have a spillover affect across the IT industry, from government to enterprises to service provisioning, because ultimately everyone is in the seek of better value.

As to when exactly we will reach the tipping point, it’s hard to say. But in the interim, every penny that is borrowed to finance public spending, will stretch out the consolidation rubberband aimed at more efficient use of computing resources. After all, governments like any other organizations these days depend on information technology, so jumping off the train in an attempt to maintain the status quo will not be an option.

Written by Juha Holkkola, Managing Director of Nixu Software

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