Soon, IPv6-only devices will be out there
It’s no secret that the pool of unique IPv4 addresses is quickly evaporating. Enterprises are thus heartily encouraged – while the U.S. federal government has been mandated – to start IPv6-enabling their public-facing Web sites now.
Wireless and mobility play a big role in the urgency to migrate to IPv6. The continual release of shiny new smartphones, tablets and other communications gadgets means that it won’t be long before mobile devices will support only IPv6 addresses. Why? At the rate mobile devices are being created – not only for user access, but for wireless machine-to-machine communications, too – there simply won’t be any more IPv4 addresses to assign them.
Also read: No IPv6 plan? You’re behind schedule
Granted, there is a big supply of IPv4 addresses that service providers, enterprises and others have stockpiled over the years. So unique IPv4 addresses may not disappear as suddenly as we might think.
But it’s been reported that within the next six months or so, only the longer-bit IPv6 addresses will be available. The Number Resource Organization (NRO), the official representative of the five Regional Internet Registries that oversee allocation of all Internet number resources, said in October that only 10% of unique IPv4 addresses remained unallocated.
So it’s probably fair to say we’re on borrowed time.
The point is that you want to be sure that any IPv6-only devices that crop up can get to your Web content. That means you need to add IPv6 support to your IPv4-based Web environment. Fortunately, you don’t have to do it all at once. The components of the Web environment imminently needing to speak IPv6 are those that will directly interact with IPv6 content requests from the Internet.
Those elements are firewalls, proxy and reverse-proxy servers, Web load balancers and Web servers. You might upgrade all your Web servers; or, you might start with just some and upgrade the rest of your Web server farm as you see increasing numbers of IPv6 content requests roll in.
The safe recommendation is to enable IPv6 access to your own Web environment and to allow your own employees – who might find themselves with IPv6-only devices themselves – to be able to access IPv6 Internet content by 2012.
