I am often asked about IPv6, especially as it relates to the 8e6 product line. For those that are unfamiliar with IPv6, it’s a new IP protocol that will replace the current IPv4 protocol at some point in the future. The major driver for the transition to IPv6 is the total number of available IP Addresses. With the current IPv4 protocol the total number of IP addresses available is 4,294,967,296 (2³²).

When IPv4 was originally envisioned the primary users of IP Addresses were research facilities and governments. As more business joined the online community, they of course needed IP Addresses as well. In the 90s there was an explosion in the number of IP Addresses allocated to home users for Internet access from home computers. Now we are seeing more devices using IP Addresses. Cell Phones, wireless e-Books, and wireless MP3 players are now using IP Addresses in order to communicate online.

The problem is that at some point in the future we will simply run out of available IPv4 Addresses. IPv6 on the other hand supports 2¹²⁸ (about 3.4×10³⁸) or (3.4 times 10 with 38 zeros following.) That would leave approximately 5×10²⁸ IP addresses for each and every person alive on our planet today. Needless to say, that’s a lot of addresses.

IPv6 is already implemented, and in limited use in some organizations. These organizations are primarily government and research facilities, such as universities. From talking to many of our customers, it appears that the enterprise is eyeing IPv6 but not ready to implement IPv6. As far as K-12 Education goes, IPv6 is a concern, but once again, implementation is a long way off. Most of the customers I talked to in both enterprise and K-12 education summed up their IPv6 plans as “All of my backbone equipment purchases, such as routers and switches, will be IPv6 compatible but I will not be enabling IPv6 until I absolutely have to.”

It seems that 8e6 customers are not any different from what is happening at other organizations, including the US Government. The US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has set forth a mandate for IPv6 compatibility by June 2008. It appears that most of the government agencies are responding by implementing a back bone that supports IPv6, but not enabling IPv6 in order to comply with this mandate. Let’s face it, when it comes down to it, implementing IPv6 will be expensive even in small networks, much less large networks.

Conversations with Gartner Analyst, Neil Rickards, have definitely crystallized the difficulties with IPv6 for me. Ensuring that the backbone for IPv6 is in place is only the beginning. Once the backbone is in place, all of the other systems on the network will also need to be IPv6 ready. This includes the desktops, laptops, network printers, network storage as well as a plethora of other devices. Now that the infrastructure is handled, we will now have to worry about software. Much of the software that we use today communicates on the network. From the periodic A/V updates, to checks for software updates, to online reference of information within the application (such as presentation creators downloading themes from websites or music software connecting to online stores for MP3 players) our applications are connecting to the Internet. How many of these applications are IPv6 ready?

IT Administrators will have the daunting task of cataloging each and every application used on the network prior to an IPv6 deployment. As time goes on we will know more about which applications will work well in an IPv6 environment and which won’t. The OMB is doing the rest of us a favor by mandating IPv6 in the US Government. The government will be one of the first to run IPv6, and as such they will be the first to find the incompatibilities with both the infrastructure devices, and the software we use day to day. The manufacturers of these devices will release patches for these devices or software applications that address the incompatibilities, or they will simply deem them not IPv6 compatible and require an upgrade to a new version. This means that when the large enterprise organization that work directly with the US Government begins their IPv6 roll outs, some of the path will have already been laid by various governmental departments.

The rest of the enterprise will of course eventually follow suit, with the path having already been paved by the early adopting enterprise organizations. At this point I will expect that K-12 education will be next, adopting IPv6 when it becomes absolutely necessary. This is not because K-12 education is slow in adoption. This is because K-12 education institutions represent, for the most part, fairly large networks with a very diverse user population. Couple that with an IT staff that is usually less than half that of an enterprise with a similar user count and a budget that is fixed, most K-12 institutions will not have the ability, both physically and financially, to be an early adopter of IPv6 unless funding is made available to them by the government for this purpose.

It is also important to point out that ALL of the customers I talked to indicated that they planned to support IPv6 and IPv4 simultaneously when they rolled out IPv6 to their end users.

So what is 8e6 doing about IPv6?

Quite simply, we are done from a hardware standpoint, and we are working on it from a software standpoint.

As for our hardware devices all models of the 8e6 R3000 Internet Filter, 8e6 Enterprise Reporter, 8e6 ProxyBlocker, and the 8e6 Threat Analysis Reporter are IPv6 compatible. This means that the hardware is capable of communicating on an IPv6 network.

However, the software on these devices is not yet IPv6 compatible. We are planning to release an IPv6 compatible version of the software for all of these devices in the late 2008 to early 2009 time frame. How this will be handled is yet to be determined since we are still in the R&D phases on the IPv6 support. Do keep in mind that all of our hardware devices are capable of downloading software updates directly from 8e6, which means it is likely that your IPv6 support will be delivered to you in one of our software updates. As time goes on we will continue to keep you updated on our support for IPv6. However 8e6 does remain committed to ensuring that our products will meet your needs. If you have a specific questions about our plans for IPv6, feel free to contact me directly.

[Mark Parker is the Product Manager here at 8e6 responsible for the R3000 Internet filter.]

Tags: 8e6, Enterprise Reporter, IPv6, R3000, Threat Analysis Reporter

This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 4:20 pm and is filed under Product Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.