There’s no question that the move from IPv4 to IPv6 is a necessary move over the next several years. And an oft-quoted milestone for the adoption is the use of IPv6 by the federal government. However, we thought it would be interesting to step back from this for a moment and look at whether and how this move could affect the industry.
There’s no question that the move from IPv4 to IPv6 is a necessary move over the next several years. And an oft-quoted milestone for the adoption is the use of IPv6 by the federal government. However, we thought it would be interesting to step back from this for a moment and look at whether and how this move could affect the industry.
IPv6 vs. IPv4
First, a little historical perspective. We can’t help but point out that the federal governments was the major – and almost sole – user of SMDS about 15 years ago. This was purported at the time to be the salvation of SMDS and the death knell for both ATM and frame relay, not to mention IP-based networks. And if you’ve been in the industry for less than 10 years, you’re probably wondering what SMDS was.
Similarly, the government was a major adopter (and the only major adopter) of the OSI protocol suite. As noted elsewhere, “In 1990, NIST released a document called The Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS #146) which outlined the GOSIP. All vendors were asked to comply with government offices implementing this profile starting around August of 1990.
“Unfortunately, by the time the government got around to ‘standardizing’ and ‘implementing the GOSIP standard’ the Internet had already fully implemented TCP/IP as its own standard and was using it exclusively. TCP/IP and GOSIP were NOT compatible. The government, caught with a technology that no longer matched the de-facto standard used on the Internet then mandated that the IETF and the IAB make the Internet compatible with GOSIP even though the OSI GOSIP software was not yet finished and not fully standardized even by 1990 when the FIPS #146 document was published.”
So with this modicum of cynicism, let’s move forward to the present. On Sept. 28, the Federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, issued a memorandum instructing, among other things, that “In order to facilitate timely and effective IPv6 adoption, agencies shall… upgrade public/external facing servers and services (e.g. web, e-mail, DNS, ISP services, etc) to operationally use native IPv6 by the end of FY 20121.”
Interestingly, that’s all that it says. Does “operationally use” mean that it’s an option? And how is this option supposed to be implemented? Does this mean that if you want to connect to http://cio.gov your browser is going to have to be using IPv6?
Obviously not. Because there was an immediate footnote that “To ensure interoperability, it is expected that agencies will also continue running IPv4 into the foreseeable future.”
Will we be using IPv6 within a few years? You betcha. Will this government mandate have a major impact on pushing this forward? No way. Instead, what enterprises need to be looking toward is a future of duality.
And we’ll continue looking at the whats and whys for the next couple of newsletters.
