IPv6: Advice From the Top

Computerworld - The Internet Protocol made the Internet possible, but it's reaching its limits as connections multiply. Should you be moving to IP Version 6 (IPv6) soon? We went to Bob Hinden, co-chairman of the IPv6 Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force, to find out.
What should U.S. IT managers be doing now about IPv6, if anything? I think it's a touch too soon to actively do a full deployment and switch everything over. But they should be doing pilot programs and starting the process of seeing what it would take to deploy data networks, which products have it and things like that. They should talk to their vendors -- including application vendors -- and service providers about getting IPv6 support.
When will we see a substantial adoption of IPv6 by users? Are you going to ask me what the right lottery ticket number is?
OK, but are vendors ready? My understanding is that Microsoft is running IPv6 internally. That's a pretty strong statement, that it's running in their network today.
Routers know how to do IPv6 -- everyone is doing dual stacks. Then there's the host operating systems. Microsoft's strategy is fairly clear now, and it's in all the open-source operating systems. It's in most of the server and desktop operating systems.
Is IPv6 an issue at the level of application software, such as an enterprise resource planning system? In most of those higher-level applications, you just type in the name of a device and it resolves. So the amount of work you have to do is none or very small.
Is there anything users should be doing now to their IPv4 networks? No, that's not really an issue.
Is IPv6-over-IPv4 tunneling likely to be the transition strategy of choice for most companies? We'll see a lot of that, and we'll also see a lot of pure dual stacks, where there will be native v6 and v4 on the wire and they'll just run in parallel. And if their Internet service provider has v6 support, they can just send their v6 packets to the ISP, and the ISP might later have to tunnel them.

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