Time to start planning for IPv6

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 04 November 2010 11:23

Business IT - Networking

Even if you're not consider an early migration to IPv6, industry experts say now is the time to start planning.

The rate of depletion of the IPv4 address space means global allocations will run out by the middle of 2011, according to Internode CIO Frank Falco. That doesn't mean the Internet will stop working, or that no new devices will be able to connect, as many homes and organisations use NAT (network address translation) to share one public address between several or even many devices.

One of the big advantages of IPv6 is that it has a huge address space. That's not huge in the sense of the apocryphal 'nobody will need more than 640K of RAM', but huge as in 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses. As Wikipedia puts it "this is the same number of IP addresses per person as the number of atoms in a metric ton of carbon."

There's no intention that all the addresses will be used, but it does mean that every device can have its own address, doing away with the need for NAT.

IPv6 is already implemented in modern operating systems and enterprise class network equipment such as routers and firewalls, said Qing Li, chief scientist at Blue Coat Systems. Compatibility issues, he said, tend to occur in software, and with external services that are not yet running IPv6. Blue Coat's IPv6 Secure Web Gateway Appliance provides a bridge between internal IPv4 networks and external IPv6 services.

Home and small business users face a slightly different problem in that many of the routers (not to mention network-connected peripherals) sold into those markets have been IPv4 only. Internode officials pointed out that some recently introduced and affordable home/SME routers such as the NetComm NB6Plus4 do include IPv6 support.

There are security issues associated with the move to IPv6, so please read on.