Migrating To IPv6 Will Dominate Your IT Budget

The last two or three years has seen a bubble in budget planning for investing in virtualization, mainly around VMware and, to a much smaller extent, HyperV. HP and Cisco have been particularly aggressive in creating and exploiting this market with VMware. This has expanded into hardware and peripherals, especially storage and storage connectivity, to support virtualization capability.

The recent pause in software product releases from Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM, HP and other major application vendors (as they consume their recent acquisitions) means that customer budgets can focus on operational efficiency in the infrastructure. Virtualization is localized to the servers and data centers, and focused on the clear benefits of optimizing a handful of IT infrastructure functions around server capacity and operation. Virtualization is cost-control technology. IPv6, in contrast, is a mandatory requirement for the entire IT system, making it relatively far more important.

With the public IPv4 Internet address pool exhausted and the final IP ranges being allocated, we are now facing the forced migration to IPv6. What does this mean for corporate IT budgets?

In a sense, virtualization has been the only significant investment in IT infrastructure that is improving operational capability. But IPv6 has become an immediate problem, and you may need to hold off on planning further virtualization and cloud computing efforts until your migration plans are in order. IPv6 migrations will be gradual and resource-intensive. However, they can bring significant benefits to the entire IT infrastructure, and other projects will ride upon the back of IPv6. This happened in 1998-1999, when many minor projects were folded into Y2K planning. These projects were not entirely relevant, but presented opportunities for inclusion.

Implementing IPv6 will require significant resources, extensive planning and commitment to implementing change. The migration to IPv6 means upgrades to data center equipment, but also significant changes to desktops, security and compliance software, network management systems, WANs, telecommunication strategies, IP telephony and more.IPv6 also presents an opportunity to overhaul everything from desktops through network management, which will automatically introduce scope-creep into any IT project. Small to midsize enterprise markets will not embrace IPv6 early, and many enterprises will delay entry for as long as possible. They will instead use NAT64 or 6to4 tunnels because, prior to this year, IPv4 exhaustion was not expected to happen this soon.

IPv6 projects will become high profile within executive levels in the next six months or so, likely driven by extensive public coverage. Virtualization projects will start to suffer a loss of focus, and implementation rates may slow dramatically. This will be great news for networking vendors and networking professionals, who will find renewed interest in the network as a fundamental part of IT strategy for the first time in many years. This will not be such good news for people who think that cloud is the second coming.

Many people will lose sight of the fact that use of IPv6 will significantly enhance cloud offerings. The IPv6 protocol includes several features that improve access to cloud services, improve use of mobility technologies, improve security and ultimately will benefit virtualization overall. New moves for IPv6 Mobile IP to support dynamic workloads have been proposed in standards committees, and will offer solutions for the poor scalability and poor reliability of L2 Data Centre Interconnections.

Unlike many other business initiatives or plans, the IPv6 migration has no workaround and cannot be delayed. There is no price to be paid to "get out of it," and there is no risk that can be accepted when things just don't work. IPv6 will take a little time to appear in corporate IT planning and flow through to budgets and the bottom line--perhaps as long as a year. But it will upset existing IT project budgets as IT moves to perform the biggest network upgrade since 1999.

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