Google Engineers Say IPv6 Is Easy, Not Expensive

alphadogg writes "Google engineers say it was not expensive and required only a small team of developers to enable all of the company's applications to support IPv6, a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol. 'We can provide all Google services over IPv6,' said Google network engineer Lorenzo Colitti during a panel discussion held in San Francisco Tuesday at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Colitti said a 'small, core team' spent 18 months enabling IPv6, from the initial network architecture and software engineering work, through a pilot phase, until Google over IPv6 was made publicly available. Google engineers worked on the IPv6 effort as a 20% project — meaning it was in addition to their regular work — from July 2007 until January 2009."

Comments

There is a huge penalty with IPV6 vs. IPV4

[laing]

Whether your routers/switches are "store and forward" or "cut over", there will be additional latency and significantly more overhead involved in routing IPV6 traffic. If the entire net were converted to IPV6 today, it would melt. Fortunately people will likely continue to use IPV4 for a long time and the IPV6 traffic will grow slowly enough that router technology will improve as necessary.