A recent IP address survey by Infoblox revealed that, despite all the recent media coverage of the end of IPv4 addresses and IPv6 World Day, enterprises are feeling unprepared and uncertain about what to do.
This suggests significant opportunities are out there for offering advice on IPv6 strategy, auditing existing systems for IPv6 readiness, and a whole range of migration, customisation, training and consultancy services as well as support and product sales.
While not every reseller has the necessary knowledge of IP address management and related core network services – and these do require investment in training and technology – Infoblox has years of experience in this area. Those who wish to expand their portfolio to take advantage of the exciting opportunities available, should take a look at what vendors like us have to offer in the way of IPv6 training, technology and support because there is tremendous enterprise interest and demand that needs to be met by someone – shouldn’t it to be you?
This article outlines the opportunities, and how best to address them.
Dirk Marichal, VP EMEA Infoblox
The market potential
The Infoblox survey of enterprises across the EMEA region revealed that 80% of those questioned felt they were not well enough informed to take on IPv6, while 67% felt real concern about IPv6 deployment, and 35% did not even know which network elements support IPv6 today. 40% admitted that they still track IP addresses using spreadsheets rather than automated IPAM – a clear indicator of unreadiness for IPv6 migration.
This clearly represents an enormous opportunity for VARs with the knowledge and skills to take advantage of the situation. Infoblox sees IPv6 as an ongoing challenge for organizations for many years to come, with dual stack (IPv4 and IPv6) environments becoming the norm for most enterprises over that period.
But first, what are the snags? Media hype can result in a cynical backlash. After the big fuss about Y2K, some clients might dismiss the IPv6 as another ”storm in a teacup”. So it is worth pointing out that we are not talking about the end of the Internet, or the world, but rather a storm on the horizon that will be growing for several years.
Indeed, it is worth being realistic and pointing out that the immediate uptake of IPv6 will be largely across emerging markets, while most businesses in Europe and America are still serving an IPv4 population. For such companies, it would be premature to make a massive investment right now in IPv6 migration.
Having said that, it would be an equal mistake to ignore the problem. The situation is a similar to the early days of ISO accreditation: early adopters saw little immediate return for their efforts but, once the ball was rolling, late-comers found they were losing good contracts through not being accredited.
The advice then to every client is not to ignore IPv6, but to make a start by assessing the company’s current situation and needs, then to plan a migration strategy for the coming years.
The problem, and the objections
In February, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) released the last remaining blocks of IPv4 addresses to the individual regional Internet registries. So, once any regional registery has given out all its IPv4 addresses, they won’t get any more and we need to move to a next-generation networking protocol offering many more addresses.
The shortfall arises because IPv4 was created in the early 90s, using a numbering scheme that could allow up to four billion different addresses. It did not anticipate people having multiple devices – a PC, a SIP phone, a laptop, a smartphone etc – nor for the uptake of IT in emerging third world nations.
Another problem is that the two schemes are incompatible, as the addresses are totally different in size and format. So computers with IPv4 addresses cannot communicate with machines with IPv6 addresses. Meanwhile there has been an explosion in new mobile devices and new users in emerging markets – and not enough IPv4 addresses to supply them, so they will use IPv6 addresses instead. But businesses want to ensure that their websites, customer portals and online services will be accessible to these users, or potential customers will not be able to find them online. The longer enterprises wait, the bigger the market that they are denying access to their goods or services.
One stop-gap solution to the difficulty is provided by NAT (Network Address Translation). When an internal IPv4 device wants to communicate to the outside world, its network or provider can have a NAT server that translates the internal IPv4 address into a unique IPv6 address for use outside the network. And, when a message comes back into thenetwork, the NAT server translates the unique IPv6 address into the internal IPv4 address, and it goes back to the IPv4 device.
In this way, IPv4 addresses already assigned elsewhere can be re-used within any network. In practice, however, NAT adds latency; it also adds another point of failure and, more importantly, some services simply do not work through NAT. The Internet connection is there, but the service offering would be degraded and any business that relied solely on NAT would be at a competitive disadvantage.
In practice, this means that it will be a very long time before IPv4 becomes irrelevant, and most organisations will in coming years want to migrate to ’dual stack’ networks handling both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in order to provide the widest possible market potential – as well as allowing contact with the greatest range of partners and suppliers.
The above statistics show that the majority of enterprises are needing help to do this, and this is where the opportunity lies.
Initial consultancy opportunities
Any planning or migration to IPv6 must start with an audit of what is on the customer’s network and an assessment of IPv6 readiness in relation to business needs. Go-ahead VARs should already be contacting their customers and prospects today to offer such services. As suggested above, customers may not be ready to buy, but they should already be thinking about setting money aside in their 2012 budgets.
The first point is that the added length and complexity of IPv6 addresses means that common existing processes, such as managing addresses using spreadsheets or free management tools, are hopelessly inadequate and will lead to a surge in human error if persisted in. So the customer must be prepared to automate their core network services, including domain name system (DNS), IP address assignment (DHCP) and IPAM, before starting to migrate to IPv6.
Other initial recommendations would be to:
• Revise security policies, because IPv6 security issues are not yet as well understood and documented as IPv4’s
• Check application compatibility with IPv6 – and available upgrades
• Before upgrading to new IPv6-compatible devices, check the risks – how long have these devices been deployed, what is their reliability and service track record?
• Check current management and troubleshooting tools and processes – are they compatible with IPv6?
• When it comes to committing to upgrades, remember that it is not enough just to test individual components. Prepare to test the upgraded systems as working wholes. Today’s automated test solutions are designed to cope with such complexity, so get to know what assistance is available for this step.
Infoblox provides VARs with the necessary tools and training to make short work of the initial audit and IPv6 Readiness Assessment, or can partner to provide services as needed.
When it comes to action, the actual migrations and integrations could be offered in several ways. Most VARs will offer project-based migrations, which should include a detailed scope of work. Others might find it simpler to sell on a time and materials basis with a scheduled rollout over months, quarters or years. Others might offer man-power, either on-site or remotely, as a strategy to lock in their customers’ projects in a form that fits their customers needs. Still other VARs who sell outsourced servers will roll the costs of the network upgrade into their customers’ monthly service fee.
Other VAR opportunities include:
• Consultancy services. VARs should be able to offer a service to manage the transitions for those IT teams that do not have the bandwidth or skill sets to do it themselves.
• Customizations. Who better than the VAR who installed the network to know how to provide customizations during the transition to IPv6?
The recommended migration process
Infoblox recommends its clients to address IPv6 migration in four stages that could be spread over several years if need be:
1. First set up some form of IPv6 test methodology or service, so that nothing will be implemented before you have the means to test it thoroughly.
2. Then make sure initially that your external services are IPv6 capable, so that any IPv6-only devices will be able to reach your website, e-mail and/or applications as readily as existing IPv4 users. That way you won’t risk losing potential new customers.
3. Your core routing infrastructure must next be upgraded to handle IPv6 traffic – dual-stack upgrades to core and edge routers, end point devices and hosts. DNS AAAA and DHCPv6 too? Some systems, like Microsoft Windows, do require DHCPv6.
4. Where IPv6 can not yet be supported, create temporary IPv4 islands and use NAT to allow your IPv6 devices to access them. With these in place, you have bought time to slowly migrate the applications etc out to the dual stack infrastructure as upgrades become available and practical.
With this in mind, we suggest that enterprising VARs should start right now upgrading their knowledge and skills in the following areas in order to get ahead of their competition:
• DNS, DHCP and IP address management products. Infoblox – the clear market share leader in the DDI market, according to Gartner and IDC – can provide IPv6-ready products for each of these services.
• Network hardware refreshes or upgrades. Network hardware vendors see a great opportunity in IPv6 to sell their newest platform versions. Cisco and Juniper see customers needing to upgrade older versions of their switches and routers.
• Security will also be a major concern with IPv6. Those VARs who carry security products should look for significant growth in this part of their business.
Assistance already available to VARs
As well as providing the most comprehensive range of products for automating core etwork services such as IPv6 IPAM, DNS over IPv6, forward and reverse mapping, DHCP and IPv4to 6 transition, Infoblox is developing dedicated tools and marketing support for partners addressing the IPv6 opportunities described. These include:
• Training courses in DNS, DHCP and IPAM , either hosted in our classrooms or remotely. Also hands-on laboratory training and technical certification.
• Co-sponsored courses through Internet Services Consortium (ISC), the leader in IPv6 training (Is this confirmed in EMEA???)
• Guidelines on IPv6 network readiness assessment – tools to determine whether a network is ready for IPv6, but also where that network falls short, so fixes or updates can be made.
• IPv6 upgrade professional services tools to help with the transition to IPv6 are essential. Infoblox will continue to create and share these with customers and partners.
• Support – when a customer has a problem with IPv6, Infoblox can offer more than ten years experience with IP Management technology.
• Also white papers, marketing tools and events to help promote VARs and raise market awareness.
Start now !
IPv6 is creating lucrative opportunities for both product and service offerings. VARs should be preparing now to position themselves as ready to advise and assist migration to IPv6 as the market matures.
To get a taste of the size of the opportunity, and what is needed, we suggest you put the following seven key questions to your customers and prospects, and see what they say:
1. Is your IT staff trained on IPv6?
2. Do you now how ready your systems are for IPv6?
3. Do you have a plan for implementing IPv6?
4. Do you have IPv6 address space allocated?
5. When will your external servers support IPv6?
6. Do you have applications that depend on website logs to determine website visitors?
7. If so, have you considered how you can use valuable log data if IPv6 only devices access your network and you have an IPv4 only website?
Dirk Marichal, VP EMEA Infoblox explains