IPv6 in the Enterprise May Happen Unexpectedly Fast

As I write this blog I’m sitting in the Rocky Mountain IPv6 Summit. Specifically, I’m sitting in the Enterprise track. And listening to an excellent lineup of speakers, I’m shifting some of my long-held views on IPv6 in the enterprise.

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The Case for Enterprise IPv6

The business case for IPv6 in service provider networks – particularly broadband service provider networks – is all about the address supply, and you know the routine well: The IANA IPv4 address pool is gone,  the APNIC, ARIN, and RIPE pools will be gone before the end of the year, yadda yadda yadda…

(LACNIC and AfriNIC IPv4 pools will last a bit longer, but they’re on their way to depletion also.)

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What's Next with IPv6?

We recently held the annual executive meeting of the Rocky Mountain IPv6 Task Force – which primarily consisted of eating sandwiches around Scott Hogg’s kitchen table – and a topic on the agenda was a discussion of future directions for the Task Force. An opinion was expressed that the RMv6TF’s mission would be completed in a couple of years, and perhaps we should begin making preliminary plans for disbanding.

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How Are Your Hexadecimal Skills?

I ended my post on IPv6 address design saying I would follow up by showing you a few simple tricks for working with hexadecimal numbers. Then the long-predicted depletion of the IANA pool of IPv4 addresses happened, I got distracted, and wrote a couple of posts on that. But now it’s time to make good on my promise; better late than never.

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Goodbye to a Couple of Old Friends

I have a couple of charts on IPv4 address depletion that I’ve used in presentations and customer reports for years. With today’s allocation of the last five IANA /8 blocks to the five RIRs, I’ve updated the charts for the last time, to show the “Available” pool at 0 and the 256 /8s fully distributed.

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IPv4: The Beginning of the End

As predicted, IANA has allocated two /8 IPv4 blocks to APNIC. That brings the remaining IANA pool down to five, which triggers a plan to evenly allocate the remaining five /8s to the five RIRs. With the possible exception of AfriNIC and LACNIC, the RIRs will be done in 6 months or so. Depletion at the LIR level will happen case-by-case, depending on how clever, how conservative, and how well-stocked the LIR is.

Although there is still a long way to go before IPv4 is dead and gone, can we at least acknowledge its obsolescence?

IPv6 Address Design

There are a few culprits that regularly contribute to delayed or failed IPv6 deployment projects, such as poor DNS planning, insufficient testing, unanticipated application behavior, and poor IPv6 support in peripheral support, management, or security systems. Many deployment projects suffer temporary halts when the original IPv6 address design is found to be inadequate – in a few cases, the address design has had to be reworked more than once.

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Can Large Scale NAT Save IPv4?

I've written previously that as we make the slow - and long overdue - transition from IPv4 to IPv6, we will soon be stuck with an awkward interim period in which the only new globally routable addresses we can get are IPv6, but most public content we want to reach is still IPv4. Large Scale NAT (LSN, also known as Carrier Grade NAT or CGN) is  an essential tool for stretching a service provider's public IPv4 address space during this transitional period.

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Understanding Dual-Stack Lite

The previous article examined a couple of basic Large Scale NAT (LSN) architectures – NAT444 and NAT464 – for creating dual stacked networks in the face of a depleted IPv4 address pool. The focus is primarily on broadband service providers, who must somehow continue to assign addresses to very large numbers of new customers when there are no new IPv4 addresses to use. Assigning IPv6 addresses alone is not practical for two reasons:

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Large Scale NAT Architectures

Traditional NAT, as discussed in the previous article, has been used for fifteen or so years to enable the sharing of a small number of public IPv4 addresses by a larger number of privately-addressed devices. In the case of homes and small businesses, there is usually just a single public IPv4 address on the outside NAT interface. That public address is assigned by a broadband service provider.

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Understanding Carrier Grade NAT

Any general-use IP protocol stack that supports IPv6 also supports IPv4. That is, it is dual stack capable. “General-use” is an important qualifier here: Certainly there will be specialized devices that support only IPv6. But these devices – until we get to some unspecified time in the future where IPv4 no longer exists – function in “walled garden” applications such as sensor or control networks that have distinct boundaries and never interact with IPv4.

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The Dual Stack Dilemma

We are entering the transitional period between IPv4 andIPv6, and things are going to get awkward for a while. IPv4 addresses will officially be used up in the next couple of years, although for most practical purposes you can consider the pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses to be depleted already. I know of two very large service providers whose requests for new IPv4 allocations were, in the last couple of months, denied.

The “awkward period” we are entering is caused by several unavoidable facts:

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The Value of Information

One of my favorite stories (stop me if you’ve heard this one before)  concerns an aged power station. One day the station failed, leaving  the small town it served completely without electricity. The town  managers called in several engineers, none of whom could resolve the  problem – the station’s equipment was older than anything they had  worked with before.

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Confidence Levels and Calibration

Over the past several posts I’ve been discussing how networkers can reduce supposed “immeasurables” or “intangibles” to something that can in fact be measured, and I’ve been using Douglas Hubbard’s excellent book How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business as a guide. I highly recommend that you pick up a copy of the book if you want more details about the approach I’ve been discussing.

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Measuring the Immeasurable

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Close Enough

In the previous post I wrote about the difficulty – quite common among networking and IT engineers – of expressing concepts that we understand in quantifiable terms that have meaning to the CFO or anyone else who must fund our projects.

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Jeff Doyle Joins Synergy Research

I’ll get back to the discussion of quantifying intangibles in a couple of days, but I wanted to let you know that I have joined Synergy Research as a Vice President of Research, focused on IP Infrastructure and Metro / Carrier Ethernet. You can read the announcement here.

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Taking the Art Out of Networking

It’s been a long tradition around our house that I cook the Christmas dinner. I enjoy cooking but don’t get the time to do it as often as I would like; my wife does the great majority of day-to-day cooking, so she enjoys not having to cope with the Christmas feast.

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2008 IPv4/IPv6 Update

2008 was sort of a milestone year for IPv6. Foremost there was the much-touted US OMB Mandate which everyone got excited about back about 2005: By June of this year all federal agencies’  “infrastructure  (network backbones) must be using IPv6 and agency networks must interface with this infrastructure.” In the years between that mandate and the deadline, however, the language and requirements slipped significantly.

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Taking the Android Plunge

I picked up a G1 yesterday. It was a big step for me, because I’ve never really wanted a mobile phone that does more than make phone calls (and text messaging, since my teenagers seem to have lost the ability to communicate by any other means). When I was at Juniper, my boss and I fought a running battle for years: He wanted me to carry a Blackberry, and I didn’t want to be anywhere near that accessible.

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