I hope that in some of my previous posts I’ve convinced you—or at least gotten you thinking hard—that IPv6 is not a “maybe” floating out there ten or twenty years in the future, but is a hard reality that you are going to encounter probably before the end of this decade. If IPv6 is not in your current network forecasts, you’re behind the curve. You are not, however, alone. The unfortunate reality is that a tremendous number of network operators are going to be doing IPv6 implementations in panic mode.
When implementation projects are performed with short timelines because you are in a squeeze, you put your network at risk.
When you ignore reality, you put your network at risk.
When you are too aggressive in adopting a new technology, you put your network at risk.
Introducing any new technology into a network without thorough planning is, if not exactly the kiss of death, a virtual guarantee of cost overruns, operational confusion, service outages, and irate users. Yet implementation projects based on poor or non-existent planning are launched every day, even when the technology being rolled out is well understood and engineers experienced with the technology are a dime a dozen.
Putting together an IPv6 transition plan can be particularly challenging because the protocols are newer and experience is harder to come by. Over the next few posts I am going to be discussing the elements of an IPv6 plan that will help you to confidently launch an implementation project with as little pain, risk, and cost as possible.
In the next post, the first of the short series, I’ll talk about the cost of transition.
Network World and I are going to try something new:
A live hosted chat in which you can pose questions and I’ll do my best to answer in real time.
Join me for this live chat on August 1, at 2PM Eastern (18:00 GMT). No registration is required; just point your browser to:
www.networkworld.com/chat
