IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings

Generally speaking, you could say that interest in IPv6 on our MPLS VPN service has been lackluster at best, which I interpret as a sign that the typical enterprise cares nothing for IPv6.

Imagine my surprise when, in a meeting with a Fortune 100 customer last week, I discovered that IPv6 is listed as a mandatory requirement for all future MPLS VPN purchases.

It's not so much that they are concerned about running out of address space, but every new software product they develop must be tested with IPv6 and hence every development location must support it. A reliable source from their IT department estimated that approximately 30% of the total current user base is dualstack v4/v6 enabled.

This is for their internal network only, however. For their Internet-facing servers, there is no v6 option. When I asked if we could provide them with IPv6 on their existing connection to our backbone, one of their lead architect's coyly asked if I could sell him a load-balancer that supported IPv6. Fortunately we don't sell that kind of hardware, so I was off the hook :-), but it illustrates an important point in that there are still entire classes of hardware out there that can't support IPv6. This large company could enable every last user of their internal network with IPv6, but they would still be unable to use IPv6 with any of their own external/public web sites due to a lack of foresight by the standards committee's as it pertains to the use of IPv6 in situations requiring load balancing (um, hello, every major web site out there?)

So close, yet so far away...

Update: Apparently F5 has a load balancer that supports IPv6. That said, I am unaware of it's performance capabilities so further research would be required to know if it is up to the task of support the largest content applications.