IPv6 Deployments Continue Acceleration

IPv6 momentum continues to build in the face of global IPv4 address exhaustion. All major Regional Internet Registries but Afrinic have officially exhausted their available IPv4 address space. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) requiring additional IPv4 address space now must rigorously justify their requests. ISP subscriber growth can be satisfied with available though diminishing IPv4 address space, through the use of carrier grade NATs, or with IPv6. Given ever broadening end user device IPv6 support, the ultimate growth strategy requires IPv6 implementation. Many enterprises are actively engaged in deploying IPv6 as well.

Google has been measuring the percentage of IPv6 users accessing their websites for a number of years. Just recently the percentage of users accessing via IPv6 topped 12%. This data represents one perspective though probably a good indicator for the Internet at large. Extrapolating this metric per the chart below, we see the IPv6 density of the Internet doubling to nearly 25% according to our third order polynomial extrapolation. The second order extrapolation predicts 22% in two years.



How does this impact you? If your universe of Internet users to whom you invite access to your website, email servers, or other Internet applications mirrors that of Google, i.e., the whole Internet, it may behoove you to begin deploying IPv6 if you have not already. If one in five Internet users cannot access your website in two years, consider the lost opportunity in terms of commerce, communications, or information sharing. In all fairness, dual stack devices should still be able to access your site given the Internet standard approach of attempting IPv6 connections first, following by IPv4. But at some point it's likely that devices will no longer have access to an IPv4 address and will be only able to communicate via IPv6. Major ISPs have pervasively deployed IPv6 already and Android and ios mobile platforms require support of IPv6-only networks. 

If you have not yet deployed or even considered IPv6 implementation, I invite you to access our free online tools to help you familiarize yourself with business drivers for IPv6, your return on investment (ROI) for deploying IPv6, as well as IPv6 addressing and subnetting.These tools can help you understand the implications both of deploying IPv6 and of not deploying in terms of upside opportunity versus cost.

Our business needs assessment tool provides qualitative feedback based on the relative importance of key IPv6 attributes, while the IPv6 ROI calculator enables you to quantify your revenue upside against your cost to deploy IPv6 for your web presence. This tool also enables you to tweak cost parameters to more finely evaluate your ROI. Our subnet calculator allows you to experiment with IPv6 subnetting and our address planner enables you to try hierarchical address allocation models to determine which approach might work best for your network. All tools include basic help but if you need more details or have feedback, please don’t hesitate to comment on this post or contact me directly.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Handy AAAA filter in BIND 9.8

The ISC introduced a pair of new configuration file options in BIND 9.8 to enable administrators to easily filter who may receive AAAA record type responses even if valid responses exist. For example, clients on subnets that do not have IPv6 network access can be excluded from receiving affirmative answers for AAAA queries. This feature provides simpler administration than the alternative mechanism using views. The first option, filter-aaaa-on-v4,defines whether the server will return AAAA records to certain clients. Such clients are defined by the address match list parameter of the second option, filter-aaaa. Note that BIND must be compiled with the --enable-filter-aaaa option on the configure command line to enable AAAA filtering. The syntax of these options is as follows: filter-aaaa-on-v4 (yes | no | break-dnssec) ; filter-aaaa {addr_match_list;} ; The filter-aaaa option identifies the address match list for which the filter-aaaa-on-v4 option is to be applied as described
Read more

Inglorious DDI

We all know how critical DHCP/DNS/IPAM (DDI) services are. Your network cannot function without them. But like most foundational elements of anything, they are certainly not glamorous...like good luck finding a home designer who specializes in home foundations. I would not be shocked should HGTV pass on my brilliant concept for a foundation building show. I suppose most people would find a show detailing footing depths and concrete pouring techniques rather boring.  Nevertheless, there are countless shows for redesigning and remodeling homes. On most episodes the foundation is out of sight, out of mind. If it's stable, no one wants to pay it attention, they just expect it to keep doing its job, supporting the structure. Once in a while a foundational issue is brought up that unexpectedly threatens to raise the budget to heighten the drama. All work stops until the issue is addressed. And you'll notice that the owner never denies paying the extra amount to fix the issue.
Read more

BIND 9.8.0 Adds DNS64 Support - Part 2 - How is it configured?

BIND 9.8.0 introduced a new dns64 option statement that can be configured within the server named.conf options block or within a view options block. Recall from a prior post that DNS64 configures a recursive DNS server to issue A record queries on behalf of a client requesting AAAA records, then appends the returned IPv4 address to a defined IPv6 prefix. This manufactured IPv6 address enables the querying host to connect to a NAT64 gateway which will terminate the IPv6 connection from the client and map it to an outbound IPv4 connection to the appended IPv4 address, completing the connection! Whew! BIND offers a number of useful parameters within the dns64 statement to control this process. The statement syntax is: dns64 IPv6_prefix { [clients {address_match_list };] [mapped {address_match_list };] [exclude {address_match_list };] [suffix IPv6_addr;] [recursive-only (yes|no);] [break-dnssec (yes|no);] }; The IPv6_prefix parameter is the prefix to which returned
Read more