The same goes for the routers themselves. Beyond the actual routing, routers involve important ancillary functions relevant to IPv6, such as network management, high availability features, video transcoding and traffic inspection, which each need to be evaluated for IPv6 compatibility. Large organizations will need to evaluate their BGP implementation. BGP has the ability to support applications, such as propagating Access Control Lists (ACL) across an I-BGP mesh that can involve IPv4 addresses. More specifically, when the ACL data starts including IPv6 addresses, will those ACLs still propagate through the routers? Will they be corrupted? Or worse, will that router suffer some outage as a result? Those are some of the questions that enterprises will need to answer.
All organizations will need to check their use of redundant router configurations. Router backup protocols, such as the open Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) or Cisco Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP), allow an IP address to be shared among a group of routers in order for an outage to be identified quickly and so a back-up link can be identified. When IPv6 is added, large portions of the HSRP code base must be updated. Code that doesn't support IPv6 may affect the whole router.
Finally, enterprises need to figure out where to focus their testing and compliance efforts. On that score, organizations might have a few shortcuts. For the most part, companies selling to service providers, such as NTT, who are heavily invested in IPv6, are a safe bet, says Kreese. Enterprises can add to that list Cisco, Juniper and F5, says Martin Levy, director of IPv6 strategy at Hurricane Electric, the largest provider of IPv6 services in North America.
All of those providers also have a strong carrier presence where IPv6 presence is in demand. The enterprise is another matter. "The network industry is stalling when it comes to being IPv6-ready," says our anonymous CIO. " Many vendors don't seem that eager to go to IPv6 primarily due to the lack of real interest and lack of resolution of some of the security issues that remain outstanding with IPv6. Everyone is realizing it's not 1998 anymore."
