Most Enterprises Plan To Be On IPv6 By 2013

Julie188 writes "More than 70% of IT departments plan to upgrade their websites to support IPv6 within the next 24 months, according to a recent survey of more than 200 IT professionals conducted by Network World. Plus, 65% say they will have IPv6 running on their internal networks by then, too. One survey respondent, John Mann, a network architect at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, said his organization has been making steady IPv6 progress since 2008. 'Mostly IPv6 has just worked,' he said. 'The biggest problem is maintaining forward progress with IPv6 while it is still possible to take the easy option and fall back to IPv4.'"

Comments

Wrong survey audience

[ravenspear]

If it were up to the IT professionals, more businesses would already be on it.

They should have surveyed CFOs to see what percentage of businesses will budget anything for an IPv6 transition in the next 24 months.

I'm an IT professional, but I'm not currently authorized to work on a transition of our network because I have a long list of things that was deemed more important by management.

Re:Wrong survey audience

[Kenja]

100% of CFOs said "What? Who are you? How did you get into my office?"

Re:Wrong survey audience

[gman003]

Sure, IT pros are probably more likely to want IPv6. But most of the survey questions were action ones - what have you done about IPv6? When a quarter say they've already started rolling out internal IPv6, and 13% more say they're done, that says a lot. The numbers are similar for web servers with public IPv6 - 20% have started, 13% are already done. It would appear that this is a technical problem that can be explained to the bosses easily: "I'm sorry, but the Internet is full. We need to upgrade to the new Internet if we want to add more stuff. We'll still work with the old Internet, so we won't lose customers, and we're only going to need to replace ___, ___ and maybe ___."

No the biggest problem is IPv4 devices

[Sycraft-fu]

There are a lot of devices out there that cannot handle IPv6. Not only is it not feasible to just tell everyone "Oh go replace it," not all of them are cheap things that get replaced often. Some are things that are around many a year.

What we need is a good 4 to 6 NAT standard, and to try to get ISPs on board with that. You have the modem/bridge/router work all IPv6, but run an IPv4 DHCP server. Have it hand out addresses that aren't used, maybe in the experimental range since it won't even step on old IPv4 NAT with that, and reserve another section internally for its use. It then internally handles all the translation. An IPv4 device requests a site that request goes to the DNS server in the router, which goes out and gets the AAAA record. It then maps the IPv6 IP to one of its internal IPv4 IPs for the IPv4 devices. The IPv4 device has no idea what is going on, traffic works just as it always has.

Until we get something like that going, there is going to be a large scale adoption problem. Nobody wants to go IPv6 only because doing so cuts off IPv4 sites. Nobody with IPv4 needs to go IPV6 since everything supports v4.

A 4 to 6 NAT system would be a real boon for ISPs since it would alleviate address space concerns. Hell customers could have static IPv6 addresses no problem. Would be worth their while to do, as address space becomes more scarce, and nobody would mind because everything would just keep working.

Re:No the biggest problem is IPv4 devices

[kimvette]

What good is an enterprise system if SOHO customers can't reach their IPV6-hosted web sites?

Re:Ya right maybe off XP by 2013

[camperdave]

I work for a pretty good sized company and we'll be lucky to be off XP by then...

No need to worry about that. XP has IPv6 support.