United States IPv6 plan called a ‘game changer’

This is the second time the President’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has established a mandate for federal agencies related to the deployment of IPv6. Back in 2005, the Bush Administration established and later met a deadline of June 2008 for all federal agencies to demonstrate IPv6 connectivity over their backbone networks.

Kundra’s follow-on IPv6 directive was met with a positive reaction among industry experts, who said the deadlines were reasonable.

“It’s pragmatic,” Mohan says. “They are saying that by fall 2012 they will get their outward-facing systems compatible with IPv6 and that by the end of fiscal 2014 they will get everything internal done. On top of that, they are assigning IPv6 managers inside government. I thought one of the best things they did was the fourth directive, which [requires] agencies to be fully IPv6 compatible.”

Mohan said it would have been difficult for the u.s. government to reach a deadline sooner than September 30, 2012 to add IPv6 capabilities to all public-facing Web sites and services. That’s because so many IPv6 products that are sold today are not fully compatible with the IPv6 specifications, with IPv6 products from other vendors, and with existing IPv4 products and services.

“Pushing a faster date won’t necessarily create a faster implementation because there are a tremendous number of technical issues with IPv6,” Mohan said, pointing out that there is no load balancing system on the market today that is fully IPv6 compatible. “I think the federal directive will expose a lot of the holes that those of us on the front lines of IPv6 enablement know about, and hopefully by sometime next year many of those will be fixed.”

Curran says that having the U.S. government as an early adopter of IPv6 capabilities on its Web sites will help carriers and IT vendors by giving them a large potential customer base for their IPv6-enabled offerings.

“We did hear concerns at the panel today about getting production-quality, high-performance firewalls, load balancers and network management gear that supports IPv6,”Curran says. “Those vendors haven’t seen a customer base appear before…Now we have the federal government saying that it is going to be buying this equipment as part of its initiative to make its Web sites support IP6. The equipment will be there when the enterprise goes to look for it.”

Curran has been urging Web site operators to embrace IPv6 by January 2012, but he said the federal government’s deadline of September 2012 is not nine months too late.

“Does it matter that it’s September and not January? No, because it’s not a cliff-edge situation,” Curran says. “Strategically, we need to enable as much content that is dual IPv6 and IPv4 as soon as possible…There are quite a number of federal Web sites. Getting those reachable via IPv6 would be a major step forward.”

Besides the IPv6 memorandum that was released by Kundra at the workshop today, the federal government committed to delivering three other items that will help U.S. network operators migrate to IPv6:

–A template that corporate boards of directors can use when evaluating the risks that a company faces related to IPv6 deployment.

–A uniform checklist that network engineers can use to measure whether IT products are fully compatible IPv6 specifications and existing IPv4-based infrastructure.

–A dashboard on the status of IPv6 deployment nationwide.

Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra committed to delivering the first items within 90 days with help from industry leaders.

More info: IT World Canada