Titled “Inertia: The Silent IPv6 Killer,” this is the second of Owen DeLong’s posts for Light Reading discussing the challenges and benefits of Internet Protocol Version 6. From the post:
As most of you know, IPv6 is the newest internet protocol for systems to run on, creating the opportunity, perhaps necessity, for change depending on a business’ desires or needs. We have a number of situations however, where the motivation for the change required to deploy IPv6 fails both of the above tests.
Because IPv6 does not immediately bring new revenue opportunities, and it is not clear that there is an immediate benefit to the income side of the balance statement, the higher management people who make such deployment decisions generally do not view IPv6 as a positive investment or an effective use of resources. Because learning a new protocol when the current protocol appears to be working does not seem to carry any immediate benefits, neither for an organization nor a self-interest. Systems administrators, network administrators, and other IT professionals often believe that IPv6 will wait, and if they’re lucky enough will do keep until they retire.
The business case for IPv6
For the management level, there are a number of ways to make the business case for immediately deploying IPv6.
APNIC (the Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre) and RIPE (the Réseaux IP Européeans) have run out of IPv4 addresses in their general free pools, and ARIN (the American Registry for Internet Numbers), the registry for North America and much of the Caribbean, is down to just over 29 million IP addresses remaining in its free pool.
On the management level, these numbers prove the business case for an urgent deployment of IPv6. While 29 million might still seem like substantial number of IP addresses, consider that until they ran out, the Asia Pacific region was consuming new IP addresses at the rate of roughly 16 million per month.
