Hurricane Electric Gives Advance Warning: Less Than 1000 Days Left to IPv4 Exhaustion

There are now less than 1000 days projected until IPv4 exhaustion.

You need an IPv6 plan.

Hurricane Electric can provide you with native IPv6.

ABOUT IPV6

What is IPv6?

IPv6 is the next generation Internet protocol that is designated to replace IPv4.

Who needs to know about IPv6?

If you are a system administrator or network engineer, you need to understand how to deploy and administer IPv6 on your existing equipment or figure out what hardware or software you need to support IPv6.

If you are a technical manager you need to ensure that your staff gains operational experience with IPv6 in order to support your organization and customers.

If you are in sales or marketing and your business depends on the Internet then you need to develop competitive strategies for how you will present your IPv6 capability when this becomes a market driver.

If you are in executive management (a CEO, COO, CFO, or CIO) or are an investor in an Internet company, then you need to know about IPv6 from the risk management perspective of ensuring your organization has an IPv6 plan.

If you are an end user, you just need to look for IPv6 support when selecting network services, software, or hardware. It is everybody else's job to make sure you don't have to worry about the technical details of IPv6.

Aside from the technical features of IPv6, why does anybody need to deploy IPv6?

IPv6 is being deployed to get unique globally routable IP addresses, for two reasons: IPv4 addresses are running out and there are networks with more devices than can be currently assigned unique globally routable addresses under IPv4.

See the following example (and then extrapolate for China and India):

http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0606/pdf/alain-durand.pdf

When will the IPv4 address pool be exhausted?

http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/

The date the IANA is projected to run out of addresses to allocate to Regional Internet Registries (ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, LACNIC, AFRINIC) is around January 31, 2011.

The date the RIRs are projected to run out of addresses to allocate to ISPs is around November 28, 2011.

These projections assume there won't be a land rush to get IPs once end user organizations realize it is their last chance to get their own routable IPv4 address space, and that there won't be hoarding or speculation.

Why does getting IP addresses matter?

Ask yourself how relevant getting any more addresses is to the various types of services your company provides. If your organization already has all the IP addresses it will need in the next 10 years then aside from competitive issues (your competitors supporting IPv6 and saying you don't support IPv6), you may be able to ignore this warning.

Do you expect to deploy a significant number of servers in the future that need to be reachable from the Internet at large?

Do you sell a service, software, or hardware which requires customers to be able to get unique globally routable address space?

Do you assign address space to customers or end users?

IPv6 provides the ability to get globally routable addresses in the future after the IPv4 address pool is exhausted.

If you depend on your ISP to take care of this for you, then make sure they either already provide native IPv6 or have an IPv6 plan.

Network service providers, such as Hurricane Electric, must be the first to deploy so that network users can get native IPv6 and begin the task of learning, experimenting, and testing well in advance of their need to provide production services.

Is IPv6 connectivity the same as IPv4 connectivity?

Not today, and potentially not for many years. IPv6 has a varied rate of deployment by various organizations; this means some backbones have it deployed natively in their core alongside IPv4 everywhere (like Hurricane), others have it deployed on a limited number of routers as a "tunnel net," and some have not deployed it at all.

Because IPv6 deployment is different than IPv4, the backbone network topology and the connections between IPv6 backbones is different than IPv4. Any specific path via IPv6 may be faster (more direct) than IPv4, the same as IPv4, or in some cases slower than IPv4. This should be expected. Because IPv6 is still in early deployment stages, there are less servers running IPv6 than IPv4, and most of the IPv6 servers are pilot deployments running a subset of services. This also should be expected.

I'm from a large organization, projections are all well and good, give me some official dates.

An Internet Draft by John Curran (Chairman of ARIN) titled "An Internet Transition Plan" sets out some dates that may be of use within large organizations to establish internal deadlines:

ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/internet-drafts/draft-jcurran-v6transitionplan-02.txt

The following press release was issued by ARIN:

http://www.arin.net/media/releases/070521-v6-resolution.pdf

The Office of Management and Budget issued this memo dictating IPv6 compliance by June 30th, 2008:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/memoranda/fy2005/m05-22.pdf