Cisco bereidt carrier producten voor op IPv6-tijdperk

Ondanks het feit dat IPv4-adressen bijna op zijn, wordt IPv6 op dit moment nog nauwelijks gebruikt. Dat zorgt er voor dat zodra de IPv4-adressen daadwerkelijk op zijn, het gebruik van dual-stack met IPv4 en IPv6 geen oplossing is. Cisco heeft daarom haar carrier producten uitgebreid met oplossingen om netwerken met IPv4 en IPv6 met elkaar te verbinden, meldt InternetNews.com.

Het omschakelen op IPv6 is volgens Mike Capuano, director of service provider marketing of routing and switching solutions bij Cisco, niet zo eenvoudig als het simpelweg inschakelen er van naast IPv4. Dual-stack draaien werkt alleen maar wanneer de migratie naar IPv6 al op zo’n 50% ligt, echter nu IPv6 nog nauwelijks gebruikt wordt, ontstaat er een nieuwe situatie.

In deze nieuwe situatie heb je aan de ene kant een IPv4-adres en aan de andere kant aan IPv6-adres. Cisco heeft daarom voor haar carrier netwerken producten Cisco CRS-1 Carrier Routing System en de Cisco ASR series nieuwe oplossingen geïntroduceerd die het mogelijk maken om IPv4 met IPv6 netwerken met elkaar te verbinden.

Om de bestaande IPv4-infrastructuur met IPv6-netwerken te verbinden heeft Cisco een techniek ontwikkelt genaamd Large-Scale Network Address Translation (LSN). Dit maakt het mogelijk om in het bestaande IPv4-netwerk private IPv4-adressen te gebruiken op carrier-niveau. Daarnaast heeft Cisco ook Address Family Translation (AFT) toegevoegd, waarmee IPv6 verkeer via IPv4 (6-over-4) kan worden getunneld en IPv4 verkeer via IPv6 (4-over-6).

Voor het de Core Routing System (CRS-1) heeft Cisco een nieuwe blade geïntroduceerd genaamd de Carrier-Grade Services Engine. Deze nieuwe blade kan tientallen terabits verkeer afhandelen en honderden miljoenen translations aan.

Volgens Capuano is de overgang naar IPv6 nu een wortel-en-stok-situatie. De stok is het feit dat het aantal met internet verbonden apparaten hand over hand toeneemt. De wortel is de mogelijkheid om nieuwe toepassingen te kunnen gebruiken die gebruik maken van de praktische eindige hoeveelheid IPv6-adressen.

Bron: ISPam

WatchMouse ondersteunt IPv6

De "Web site performance monitoring" en "Web site and server monitoring" dienst WatchMouse ondersteunt tegenwoordig ook metingen over IPv6. Ook de WatchMouse API ondersteunt IPv6.

AMS-IX ziet voor het eerst 2Gb/s IPv6 verkeer

Lees hetvolledige bericht op Tweakers of Fix6.

IPv6 - The discussion continues

It's fascinating what does and doesn't generate discussion among us geeks. Still, we were pleasantly surprised by both the amount of discussion and continued wide range of opinions that our posing the question of the business case for IPv6 brought about. And since some of you may not have visited the discussion pages for the prior two newsletters and continued discussion at the Webtorials Water Cooler, this week's newsletters will summarize some of the comments.

IPv4 vs. IPv6
We'll start with the comments that were in favor of IPv6. One of the first people to comment stated flatly that "I will NEVER buy another router that doesn't support IPv6. One more [garden variety home router]? No thank you! These guys are already losing my business..." This was countered by a statement that many home routers already support IPv6.
Another excellent comment reinforced our contention that IPv6 is more critical for ISPs and vendors than for end users, especially in the immediate future. He stated, "IPv4 addresses will dry up around 2010-2012 - if you're an ISP and your block runs out you'll die even if your customers haven't already abandoned you. And businesses buying router hardware are already starting to require IPv6 support even if they never turn it on, so hardware makers who can't do IPv6 have already lost sales.

"But many end users who can't do IPv6 may take their time to really support it - enough layers of NAT, 6to4 and 4to6 converters and tunnels can let them limp along, and if you've already got an IPv4 address for your Web site, IPv6-only browser users will have a 6to4 NAT somewhere to let them reach you. Expect some ugliness to straggle along for years, but more and more of it will get hidden.
And even in these tough economic times, another person commented that it's time to move forward, stating, "It's not impossible to imagine that that the Internet could continue to exist for thousands of years. The number of addresses in IPv4 is less than the number of bytes of RAM in a typical desktop.
"The 'business case' for IPv6 is for the Internet to continue existing in a usable form. Sticking with IPv4 just means the future network will become ever-crappier, so we might as well just suck it up and fix it now."
Next time, we'll wrap up this discussion with a look at two disparate but interesting aspects – hex code and government mandates.

Bron: Network World

Windows 7 DirectAccess

Er staat een goed artikel over Windows 2008 / Windows 7 DirectAccess op TechTarget. DirectAccess biedt volledig geintegreerde VPN functionaliteit over IPv6, IPv4 en zelfs HTTPS. Voorwaarde is dat het interne netwerk over IPv6 beschikt.

P2P pushes IPv6 surge

IPv6 traffic levels surged over the last 12 months, with the 15-fold increase down to just one application and one ISP, according to a study by Arbor Networks. Support for IPv6 in µTorrent version 1.8, a version of the world's most popular BitTorrent client released in August 2008, had a huge effect.

"The introduction of IPv6 P2P succeeded where most previous IPv6 inducement efforts had failed (i.e. liberal peering, high quality IPv6 porn, IPv6 ASCII animation of Star Wars, etc.)," writes Arbor Networks researcher Craig Labovitz. "In the space of ten months µTorrent helped drive IPv6 traffic from 0.002 per cent to 0.03 per cent of all internet traffic (a dramatic 15x jump)."

Another IPv6 traffic increase came in April 2009, when Hurricane Electric introduced a global Teredo relay service. Hurricane Electric lit up 14 Teredo relays in Seattle, Fremont, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Toronto, New York, Ashburn, Miami, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Hong Kong. Teredo tunneling is a protocol for passing IPv6 data packets through network address translation devices.
Arbor's IPv6 traffic diagram shows an increase from 0.02 per cent to between 0.04 and 0.03 per cent of IPv6 traffic after introduction of Hurricane's service. IPv6 connectivity across the net has historically been useless. The introduction of Hurricane's service goes some way towards addressing an entrenched problem that resulted in inefficient routing and overall lack of coordination between Teredo and 6to4 relay providers that added latency, loss and jitter to IPv6 traffic, Arbor explains.
The IPv6 study compiled by Arbor uses traffic statistics from 110 ISPs. Only six ISPs out of Arbor's 110 have native IPv6 enabled. Because of this limitation, Arbor's data includes only IPv6 traffic through Teredo and 6to4 tunnels.
A similar 2008 IPv6 study by Arbor was criticised for underestimating IPv6 traffic. Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX) switch statistics showed a Gigabit or more of IPv6 traffic were cited by critics of Arbor's figures. However a July 2009 news server outage support Arbor's theory that AMS-IX IPv6 traffic was largely made up of file sharing through the free AMS-IX based IPv6 news servers and therefore not representative of the internet as a whole.
IPv6, the next generation internet protocol, brings a vastly expanded address space along with security and mobility refinements. Uptake has been slow despite predictions that a greater number of internet-connected devices and expansion of the net into countries such as China would result in IPv4 numbers getting used up. The widespread use of network address translation (NAT) technology has prevented IPv4 address exhaustion from becoming a pressing problem and the interweb has continued much as before.
Cutting-edge technology firms, such as Cisco and Google, have been big supporters of the technology, but mainstream users have stayed clear of it because of the lack of a clear business need for the technology.

Bron: The Register

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ipv6

Prepare, Don’t Panic.

Dit artikel bevat de volgende onderdelen:

• Life, the universe and IPv6
  • Interconnections
  • Content
  • Security
  • DOCSIS
  • Service introduction
  • Provisioning and DNS
  • Home networking
• Don’t Panic
• Bridges at the edge
• Summary

Lees het volledige artikel op Cable360