{"id":3400,"date":"2014-07-22T08:28:48","date_gmt":"2014-07-22T08:28:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/live-infoblox-blog.pantheonsite.io\/?p=3400"},"modified":"2020-05-06T10:31:34","modified_gmt":"2020-05-06T17:31:34","slug":"making-a-new-product-make-it-dual-protocol","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.infoblox.com\/blog\/ipv6-coe\/making-a-new-product-make-it-dual-protocol\/","title":{"rendered":"Making a New Product? Make it Dual Protocol!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lately the IPv6 community has been witnessing a disturbing trend.\u00a0 Brand new networked products are being introduced to the market without IPv6 capabilities.\u00a0 Undoubtedly, these companies intend for their products to remain relevant for the foreseeable future.\u00a0 However, they RTM their software with an already obsolete feature-set. But the cost to change these products later in the development cycle will be higher than simply introducing the product with IPv6 capabilities right from the start. Meanwhile, the rate of adoption of IPv6 continues to accelerate.<\/p>\n

For example, IPv6 is continuing to\u00a0gain steam<\/a>\u00a0and the statistics on the amount of IPv6 packets traversing the Internet continues to rise.\u00a0 Just a couple of years ago Google was only observing a fraction of one percent of IPv6 traffic.\u00a0 In the last 18 months, their amount of IPv6 traffic has gone from 1% to 4% of their\u00a0total traffic volume<\/a>.\u00a0 Cisco\u2019s\u00a06Lab site<\/a>\u00a0shows more green and darker green areas than just a year ago.\u00a0 Many\u00a0European<\/a>\u00a0countries like Belgium are experiencing climbing IPv6 traffic volumes.\u00a0\u00a0Comcast\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0IPv6 deployment is now reaching well over 20% and\u00a0Verizon Wireless<\/a>\u00a0is approximately 50%.<\/p>\n

It is important to realize that for every Facebook page that is served up over IPv6, it means that there is one less Facebook page that must be served up over IPv4.\u00a0 My personal prediction is that in just a couple of years we will reach the tipping point and the rate of rise in IPv6 traffic will be nearly vertical.\u00a0 The aggregate traffic volume will continue to rise; no one ever uses less bandwidth.\u00a0 It is only the relative percentage of mix of IPv4 and IPv6 that will vary over time.\u00a0 IPv4 traffic volumes will continue to rise until the tipping point, when more connections will prefer IPv6.\u00a0 Eventually, the use of IPv4 will taper off, though IPv4 systems will be with us for decades.\u00a0 Following is a very basic diagram illustrating this concept.<\/p>\n

As early as 2003 many U.S. Federal government agencies drafted\u00a0procurement guidelines<\/a>\u00a0mandating that they prefer products that supported IPv6.\u00a0 This policy was formally adopted in the\u00a0Federal Acquisition Regulation<\/a>\u00a0(FAR) 11.002(g).\u00a0 This was a great idea at the time to help position IPv6 in federal organizations and help manufacturers prioritize IPv6 on their product roadmaps.\u00a0 If a federal organization had an 8-year information technology refresh cycle and they stopped buying IPv4-only products in 2004 and started buying dual-protocol capable products, then by 2012 all their networks, computers and software would support IPv6.\u00a0 The idea was that if you waited long enough, eventually all the IT products in their environments would support IPv6.\u00a0 The plan was not to try to enable IPv6 right way, but to wait until some point when the federal government organizations would be able to enable IPv6 on their own timetable.\u00a0 The reality is that many federal organizations and many commercial enterprises continue to unknowingly purchase IPv4-only products.<\/p>\n

Many manufacturers and cloud providers are releasing products (and APIs) that are only configurable with IPv4 addresses.\u00a0 In 2014, it is disappointing to be seeing some new products introduced that do not have dual-protocol capability.\u00a0 These new IPv4-only products are in a class of products in the highly competitive areas of cloud management, software defined networking, and IT automation and orchestration software.\u00a0 Because of the high level of competition in these markets, the vendors are trying to come out with new features rapidly that appeal to the majority of use cases.\u00a0 Since virtually all organizations use IPv4 today, that is the only protocol these companies are concerning themselves with at the moment.<\/p>\n

The types of products that seem to be launched without any IPv6 support include:<\/p>\n