It behooves one to listen to the alpha pack member, and in this case that would be a guy whose business card reads “Alpha Coyote” – Bill Kish (News - Alert), of Coyote Point Systems.
“As the supply of available IPv4 addresses becomes exhausted, enterprises are under pressure to rapidly deploy IPv6 technology,” Kish says, adding that Hurricane Electric's (News - Alert) tunnel broker services “helped us develop the IPv6 capabilities in our products.”
Quick recap: As you’ve no doubt heard by now from various online doomsayers, the pool of unallocated Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) addresses will be exhausted in 2011. New technologies have been developed to solve this problem, one being IPv6, in 1998.
The Inquirer recently put the issue in stark terms: “The Internet is doomed until European businesses and organizations begin to move towards IPv6,” they quote Neelie Kroes, VP of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda as saying recently.
"More people online; more ways of getting online; more applications and devices online. All these developments put greater demands on our networks, and require ever higher performance from them," Kroes said, drawing the obvious conclusion: “The Internet cannot adjust to these developments, cannot continue to grow and function properly, without sufficient IP addresses."
IPv6 would allow for many new locations on the World Wide Web.
“Moving on to IPv6 will extend address space from the 4 billion addresses we have now to over 300 trillion trillion trillion,” Kroes said. Yep, that oughta hold us for a few years.
Coyote Point, a producer of load balancer technology, considers IPv6 “the only available long-term solution to IPv4 address exhaustion,” noting that many of their customers are beginning IPv6 testing and deployment and require “the capabilities of technologies like Equalizer to enable IPv6 clients to reach IPv4 hosts, and vice versa.”
The way Kish explains it, customers using an Equalizer GX ADC (News - Alert) load balancer running EQ/OS 10 can deploy IPv6 compatibility today with a dual stack network, which “eliminates the requirement of costly changes to applications or their server infrastructure.” You still need to maintain IPv4 support, and Equalizer “will allow your applications to be available for simultaneous IPv6 and IPv4 access.”
So to that end, Coyote Point is partnering with Hurricane Electric to help their customers simplify the IPv6 transition. Coyote Point customers can simply enable a tunnel endpoint within their Equalizer GX ADC that connects directly to Hurricane Electric's network to receive IPv4 and IPv6 transit over the same connection, company officials explain.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Carrie Schmelkin