IPv6 Launch Day Is Here
Posted by Yama Habibzai on Wed, Jun 06, 2012
The world changes today, although non-IT people may not notice. This day, June 6, 2012, will forever be known as IPv6 Launch Day, the moment in high-tech history that major Internet players — Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and major ISPs like AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, KDDI (Japan), Free Telecom (France), Internode, and XS4ALL (Netherlands) plus companies in more than 100 countries worldwide — officially moved from IPv4 to IPv6, deploying the new protocol permanently.
Almost exactly one year ago on World IPv6 Day, June 8, 2011, companies around the globe tested their IPv6 migrations to troubleshoot problems. Some industry analysts predicted major disruptions in networks large and small, but their anticipations of doom turned out to be without merit. The test went smoothly just about everywhere, in large part because of years of planning and development by software and hardware creators who built new products to be IPv6-ready. Based on those results, today thousands of companies and millions of websitesmade the permanent switch to the next generation of Internet protocol, IPv6.
The new protocol was necessary because the final blocks
of the 4.3 million Internet addresses in the old generation, IPv4, were assigned in February of last year. The new protocol has addresses that are not the meager 32-bit length of IPv4 but a whopping 128 bits long, which means that 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses are now available, which experts describe as “an essentially unlimited number.”
Everyone will eventually feel the impact of the switchover because IPv6 enables the extreme numbers of devices that have already begun to proliferate across all types of consumer markets. IP addresses now belong to refrigerators, TVs, the ubiquitous smartphones, and even pet ID tags and the lock on your liquor cabinet, with more commercial applications multiplying geometrically by the day. This uninhibited, unlimited growth requires IPv6 because “Big Data” is the future of IT, with even mundane machines adding intelligence to their basic make-up. The more data, the more data repositories, of which each data subset will need an IP address, and that complexity means many, many more IP addresses will be used as IT moves forward. Fasten your seat belts because innovation, here we come!
SevOne is among the leaders of those companies who are well positioned to grow with the deployment of IPv6 because everything we build is IPv6-enabled. For years, we have been designing our products from the ground up to support the imminent Big Data revolution. We embrace the opportunities that IPv6’s unlimited IP addresses bring to the IT universe, and look forward to the key role SevOne will continue to play in the evolution of IT wonders.
Happy IPv6 Launch Day, all, from SevOne!
Yama Habibzai is VP of Marketing for SevOne.