Businesses urged to adopt IPv6 sooner

Businesses should be getting more familiar with IP Version 6 right now, to be prepared when the current protocol, IPv4, runs out of available addresses — something now likely to happen in 2012, the head of a regional Internet registry said today.

John Curran, president and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers, the group responsible for the technical coordination and management of Internet number resources in the U.S. and Canada, said much of the enterprise hardware and software deployed today is IPv6-ready, but there are processes and procedures that must be implemented to make the conversion. Doing so now rather than later will enable businesses to avoid some of the performance problems experienced when linking IPv4 and IPv6 traffic through network address translation (NAT) boxes, Curran said.

Although IPv6 was defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force 10 years ago, its deployment to date has been miniscule compared to IPv4, but that is beginning to change. One of the companies driving that change is Hurricane Electric, an IPv6 backbone company based in California. In April, Hurricane Electric deployed a global set of relays that use the two most commonly accepted forms of connecting IPv4 and IPv6 — 6to4 and Microsoft’s Teredo protocol — and thus enabled much more efficient IPv6 connections around the globe.

Previously, someone looking for IPv6 connectivity in the U.S. would see their traffic routed though relay points in Europe or elsewhere, with the resulting connections being subject to delay and jitter, said Martin Levy, director of IPv6 strategy for Hurricane Electric. “If you were subject to this, it would have changed your experience from connecting to a relay far away in Switzerland or Sweden to one that may well be located much closer to you,” Levy said.

Arbor Networks just concluded its second study of global IPv6 traffic and has reported a 1400% increase in IPv6 traffic over 2008, which Craig Labovitz, chief scientist for Arbor, attributes in large part to what Hurricane Electric has done. “It’s rare that you see one service provider having this kind of impact globally,” he said.

Levy doesn’t entirely agree with Arbor’s numbers because he thinks Arbor is under-counting IPv6 traffic, but he agrees that last April’s events triggered more measureable IPv6 traffic.

“The amount of traffic we were measuring went up dramatically,” Levy said. “But we didn’t create new traffic, we fixed existing traffic. Still, we are not only seeing growth over the last year, we are seeing enterprise traffic on a low level start to show up. In this case, we have enterprise customers that are connecting to use that are starting to use real amounts of IPv6. If you compare the V6 numbers to V4 numbers, they are impressively tiny. But they are growing.”

Curran and Levy said businesses that act now will be better positioned for the transition, rather than having to scramble as the number of IPv4 Internet addresses dwindles. Much of that advantage comes from addressing IPv6’s one real weakness: the lack of a standard gateway between IPv4 and IPv6.

“If you are a large broadband provider today, you can’t tell your customers ‘I’m only connected you with IPv6’ because that may only be 10% of the Internet,” Curran said. “Some of the carriers will attempt to work around that by putting in network address translation boxes that map IPv6 onto IPv4. Today, NAT boxes get in the way of having fast, high-performance traffic because they are translating every packet and that creates latency, jitter and delay. We are going to see a growing portion of the Internet will be going through someone’s NAT box somewhere to make their V6 back to old IPv4. People who have been out in front on IPv6 deployment won’t find themselves having performance and translation problems.”

In addition, Levy said, the time is not far off when the next hot thing — say, the next Twitter — will be deployed as IPv6-only because the addresses on IPv4 will not be available.

“Things are not going to stay stagnant in what is available; new things will show up that may not have access to existing address plans in the V4 network,” Levy said. “It’s all about being ready for the future.”

Hurricane Electric offers multiple widgets for tracking how quickly IPv4 numbers are dwindling, which you can find here.