IPv6 and your LBx strategy
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Added January 22, 2010
One of the most interesting sessions at CES was one of the most sparsely attended, however it may be critical to your LBX strategy. If you “walked the show floor” it quickly became apparent that almost every device had an Ethernet port or some way of connecting to a network/the Internet. I then walked into a session named the “The Looming Internet Address Space Crisis”. Limor Schafman, President of the IPv6 Forum – Israel led a panel of experts in presenting the issues associated with the transition of IPv4 to IPv6.
This transition was driven by the impending shortage of remaining IP addresses – it seems we are down to the last 10% of the address pool. IPv6 has a vastly larger address space than IPv4. This results from the use of a 128-bit address, whereas IPv4 uses only 32 bits. The new address space thus supports 2128 (about 3.4×1038) addresses. This expansion provides flexibility in allocating addresses and routing traffic and eliminates the primary need for network address translation (NAT), which gained widespread deployment as an effort to alleviate IPv4 address exhaustion.
As you develop your LBx strategy and the correlation of next-gen web sensors, operational sensors, or any other networked device, it appears that it may be well worth reviewing where your organization is in its IPv6 preparation.
