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Federal Agencies Must Use IPv6 by 2008
MoiTominator writes "The White House Office of Management and Budget announced on Wednesday that all federal agencies must deploy IPv6 by June 2008. So far, Defense is the only agency which has made any progress toward implementing the new protocol." From the article: "While we know that IPv6 technologies are deployed throughout the government we do not know specifically which ones, how many there are, or precisely where they are located...For cost, the agencies must report on estimates for planning, infrastructure acquisition, training and risk mitigation."
Obviously you only read trade mags and know nothing about networking:
1) You're thinking older Cisco equipment. But, the same argument could be made for any number of enterprise/carrier routing vendors. If you have a router/multilayer switch designed for IPv4, you're going to have to either upgrade it with IPv6 ASICs, or replace it completely. That's part of the price of transisition, and there's no way around that.
2) No one with any level of education in the matter says "We're running out of addresses." We're running out of address SPACE. Big difference. The huge class A and B networks issued to large US corporations and the military means those countries who got online later on are losing out. Case in point...I was on the redesign team at a USAF base that had two class B networks -- for 30,000 customers.
And NAT is only a stopgap. You end up with a massive number of interoperability problems when you start NATing. With IPv6, there simply isn't the need for it, and you remove those problems.
3) Memory and CPU performance hasn't been a major issue with most routers in a long time, especially BGP routers. Massive OSPF networks, yeah, the Dykstra algorithm hits hard, but there are other, less CPU-intensive options like IS-IS, or just design your network right from the ground up and summarize properly.
Again, the problem we're going to run into here is the specialized memory used for wire-speed packet switching. But, if you're doing wire-speed, you're going to have to replace the ASICs anyway, so the TCAM gets replaced too.
4) You're right, minimum MTU size in IPv4 networks is 576 bytes. But that's a difference of 3.5% versus 7%. Not a major issue -- especially since most MTUs are in the range of 1250-1500, or even higher in pure GigE networks.
The road to IPv6 will be bumpy, but the only issue you mentioned with any real weight is the first, and that's an easy one. You just throw money at it.
Where the problem is going to lie is in long-haul data transport, IPv4 interoperability, and legacy application support. The network's the easy part.
Not trying to be harsh. But the missing improvements are outside the IP scope and functions. Just for your information:
A) Look for MPLS and its future succesor GMPLS.
B) The port concept is a TCP/UDP layer issue, not an IP issue. You can use lots of IPv6 addresses for the same device (IPv6 permits explicitly that) and just one port if that is what you prefer. I personally don't see the improvement. IP addresses are assigned to devices (in the IPv6 paradigm), ports are assigned to application uses. I personally beleive it is much straightforward this arrangement that an IP derived solution. At least now, you now port 80 means (at least should) web access.
NAT will not allow you to do easy VOIP or video-conferencing.
Now think about this: there's an entire class A subnet allocated to MIT. There's quite a few class A subnets allocated for various US governmental institutions. There's a whole one for Apple computer.
But, there's just one for the entire African continent. Some ISPs in countries besides the US cannot give their customers a real IP address! There are not enough to go round. The way they have been allocated is clearly skewed.
So yes, lots of people stand to gain by having more addresses. They just happen to be in some of the poorer nations.