IPv6 May Finally Come of Age

One of the big stories coming out of last week’s Interop show in New York was the number of vendors offering IPv6 enabled and compatible devices. The word on the street: IPv6 is not just coming to market, but an imperative for adoption.

For solution providers who have suffered through the steady decline in networking gear margin erosion and commoditization, IPv6 may be a godsend. Nearly the entire IT infrastructure is standardized on IPv4 – the standard that reconciles numeric IP addresses with our standard www.[fillintheblank].com text. As IPv6 adoption becomes a necessity, it will be a near-necessity to upgrade existing switches, routers and firewalls to this new standard. Additionally, IPv6 will allow solution providers to bundle new solutions, making for rich sales opportunities.

Calling IPv6 new is a misnomer. The standard was created more than 10 years ago when the booming dot-com era was sucking dry the Internet’s available IP address space. Rather than the 32-bit four-segment address of IPv4, IPv6’s expanded 128-bit, six-segment address space would provide a nearly inexhaustible supply of IP addresses (roughly 3.4×10³⁸).

The standards community has recognized the diminishing supply of IPv4 addresses for more than 20 years. Even before there was a Worldwide Web or Information Superhighway, they knew they would need a replacement for this rather limited protocol. Even though the first version of IPv6 was released for comment in 1998, it didn’t gain support for adoption. Instead, the world adopted the interim solution – Network Address Translation (NAT), which allows domains to mask private addresses behind their public address space.

NAT has worked just fine (there’s room for debate, but let’s not get into that now), but even this trick isn’t working any more. The reason isn’t necessarily the number of new websites, but the number of IP-enabled devices. We assign addresses to routers, servers, PCs, laptops and smartphones. Soon, we’ll start assigning addresses to refrigerators, heating systems and cars. During the next 20 years, analysts expect the number of IP-enabled devices to explode to 50 billion globally.

IPv6 comes with some significant improvements in security and routing, but they pale in comparison to the benefits of just being able to connect to the Internet and other networks. In the age of mobility and cloud computing, IPv6 might not be the killer app but the protocol that makes killer apps viable.