InteropNet's IPv6 Network Evolves For Interop New York

At this week’s Interop conference in New York, attendees will be able to see a wide range of technologies from many different vendors. But some of the most interesting technology at the show will be running inside of the show’s InteropNet network.

That’s because, as was the case at the spring Interop show in Las Vegas, IPv6 will be a big part of InteropNet, serving as both a demonstration of the technology that will run the Internet in the near future and, at the same time, providing a good set of lessons learned for businesses deploying IPv6.

One of the big take-away’s from the Las Vegas IPv6 InteropNet was how well everything worked, despite the wide variety of hardware and software used to create the network. According to Brandon Ross of the TorreyPoint Group IT consultancy and one of the team that deploys and manages the InteropNet, "The real theme of what's been going on with v6 InteropNet is that, to most everyone's surprise, v6 has worked very, very well. We've had a minimal number of problems."

Ross said that most of the problems they have encountered could be classified as minutia, but that they’ve had to deal with a lot of minutia. One of his main pieces of advice for building a IPv6 network is to pay close attention to the details.

Human error turned out to be one of the bigger problems that they ran into with the Las Vegas IPv6 network. While network managers have become used to writing down or even verbally passing on IPv4 addresses, the longer and more complex hexadecimal addresses of IPv6 can quickly lead to errors.

Ross said, "One of the things that we've learned is that, when dealing with v6, you don't want to try to write an address down on a piece of paper or to read it off to someone. What you really want to do is find some way to cut and paste or communicate that address in some form of digital fashion so that you're not making mistakes."

To help deal with these types of issues, one of the new products that will be used for the New York InteropNet is an IPAM, or IP Address Management tool. This will ease the management of the network’s address space and be a big improvement over the ad hoc tools, such as spreadsheets, that were used previously. InteropNet team member and HP Technology Consultant Jeff Enters said, "Trying to do that in a spreadsheet becomes challenging. Making mistakes and typos and things like that is much too easy. Having an actual IP address management tool to validate, align and coordinate the different addresses is beneficial."

In many ways the InteropNet is a unique beast, a custom network designed for a conference floor that runs for a time and then is torn down. But the InteropNet team believes that the lessons learned from InteropNet’s IPv6 network can be useful to traditional enterprise networks. "I think it's actually quite applicable, because of the variety of equipment we have and the networking vendors used at the show," says Ross. "I think that there’s good cross section of the kind of equipment you'll find at most enterprises, and the fact that we were able to take what is essentially the same hardware and software that most enterprises have and deploy v6 on it with a minimal amount of trouble does send a strong message to enterprises."

One new element of the IPv6 network for Interop New York could provide a few useful lessons for business environments. While the IPv6 InteropNet at Las Vegas had a single IPv6 core, in New York the show will have two separate IPv6 feeds going into two different cores--one maintained by Cisco and the other by HP.

In addition to the lessons learned from running a multicore network environment, this setup will also provide tangible benefits--for example, allowing the team to tear down the show floor network on Thursday while maintaining IPv6 connectivity for the sessions and other off-floor conference activities. Enters said, "This is a great way to show customers that it is possible to run some form of multivendor environment, even at the core level."

The IPv6 network will be running at the Interop show throughout the week. For more information, go to www.interop.com.

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