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  5. Migrating To IPv6 Will Dominate Your IT Budget: Page 2 of 2
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Migrating To IPv6 Will Dominate Your IT Budget: Page 2 of 2

The last two or three years has seen a bubble in budget planning for investing in virtualization, mainly around VMware and, to a much smaller extent, HyperV. HP and Cisco have been particularly aggressive in creating and exploiting this market with VMware. This has expanded into hardware and peripherals, especially storage and storage connectivity, to support virtualization capability.
March 07, 2011

IPv6 also presents an opportunity to overhaul everything from desktops through network management, which will automatically introduce scope-creep into any IT project. Small to midsize enterprise markets will not embrace IPv6 early, and many enterprises will delay entry for as long as possible. They will instead use NAT64 or 6to4 tunnels because, prior to this year, IPv4 exhaustion was not expected to happen this soon.

IPv6 projects will become high profile within executive levels in the next six months or so, likely driven by extensive public coverage. Virtualization projects will start to suffer a loss of focus, and implementation rates may slow dramatically. This will be great news for networking vendors and networking professionals, who will find renewed interest in the network as a fundamental part of IT strategy for the first time in many years. This will not be such good news for people who think that cloud is the second coming.

Many people will lose sight of the fact that use of IPv6 will significantly enhance cloud offerings. The IPv6 protocol includes several features that improve access to cloud services, improve use of mobility technologies, improve security and ultimately will benefit virtualization overall. New moves for IPv6 Mobile IP to support dynamic workloads have been proposed in standards committees, and will offer solutions for the poor scalability and poor reliability of L2 Data Centre Interconnections.

Unlike many other business initiatives or plans, the IPv6 migration has no workaround and cannot be delayed. There is no price to be paid to "get out of it," and there is no risk that can be accepted when things just don't work. IPv6 will take a little time to appear in corporate IT planning and flow through to budgets and the bottom line--perhaps as long as a year. But it will upset existing IT project budgets as IT moves to perform the biggest network upgrade since 1999.

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