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If you're getting connectivity in a data center...
...as a transit over an international connection...
...as a cross connect inside a telecom hotel...
...if you are an enterprise...
...IPv6 should just be a tick mark.
Around 2001 was when Hurricane Electric first started to look at IPv6 and say...
'how do we even get our feet wet?'
The experience of doing something new, in this case IPv6...
...always has a plus, but finding the value...
...finding where the customers come from, was a very slow process.
But from 2006 through 2007, 2008 and now 2009...
...the growth of IPv6 on our network has been enormous...
...and it has been not only because of the right base...
...but also because of the fact that we had a commitment.
The key part was that the business case was starting to make sense over all those years.
The business case for us was that we still wanted to be in business...
...when we saw IPv4 depletion as being real.
customers
We saw customers coming to us because they had an IPv6 requirement.
They were looking for IPv6 providers, they chose us...
...so we see revenue coming in directly because of customers looking for IPv6 capabilities.
We also have customers that come to us and say...
'oh, you do that IPv6 thing? What is that? And should we know something about it?'
We talk about the reasons why you should look at having IPv6 in your network...
...why you're doing future protection...
...why, if you're a content company, you may have a consumer base in a couple of years time...
...that may only be able to access you over IPv6.
And those companies come back and say, 'ok, we'll add that to our engineering roadmap'.
So that is not the primary reason they came to us, but hopefully somewhere they go...
'huh, good thing we came to a provider that actually understood where the future was going'.
strategy
If we were going to be in any way successful...
...we had to make sure that everybody from the front desk through the accounting department...
...and definitely through the sales department, understood what IPv6 was.
So we made probably three very conscientious decisions:
First conscientious decision was that everybody in the company...
...had to understand what IPv6 was.
Second part was that we needed to make sure that our customers understood...
...that when they phoned in for support, they weren't asking a special question.
If you phoned into the NOC and said, 'I have a v6 issue, I have a v6 question'...
...the person would respond with saying, 'yes, how can I help you?'
as opposed to, 'oooh, you want to talk to Joe, v6, yeah, that's Joe's department.'
'He's not here til Thursday.'
That was not what we wanted to do.
We wanted to take that decision and get ahead of the curve.
The third thing we did was, we said let's take this out of the company.
And that's what created the IPv6 Certification Program...
...which is on Hurricane Electric's website.
That type of outreach to the community and help with them...
...has not only had benefits from a marketing point of view...
...but has also clearly brought a lot more people to the table for IPv6...
...wherever they are in the world.
roll-out
One of the things that we have talked to prospective customers...
...and have seen as great success...
...has been to talk to the engineering staff, business development staff...
...whichever the right group is that's pushing the IPv6 initiative...
and say: 'take one step at a time'
'and far more importantly, take at least one step into the v6 world'
'even if it's in your test lab, even if it's only in a tiny part of your network'
'and get some familiarity'.
And it turns out that once you take the first step...
...you sort of start realising that parity between IPv4 and IPv6.
Things are pretty consistent: you do this in IPv4, you do the equivalent in IPv6.
If you're doing security and filtering in IPv4, you do security and filtering in IPv6.
Why wouldn't you?
If you're doing address management in IPv4, you do address management in IPv6.
That has been very useful to people.
To realise that maybe getting a little bit of IPv6 in the network...
...before re-thinking the whole problem, it makes life a little easier.
planning
When we look at planning for IPv6...
...we plan for it in the same way we plan IPv4.
So let's go through some of the things that Hurricane Electric did.
DNS services to all our customers, and to the external world.
That was one of the easiest things to do in the IPv6 world.
Email: email took a little bit of time.
Only recently have you started to see the appropriate tools...
...working for carrier-based or ISP-based email systems to support IPv6.
One of our interesting hiccups was NTP, the Network Time Protocol.
So we took a step back, went back to the open source solutions...
...which had been fairly well tested, but that was a step back to us...
...and now we're pushing for that to come out again, commercial-grade IPv6.
Everything else, the stories of Internet routers and core backbone routers...
...throughout the eight years that we've been playing with...
...the history is an interesting story, but the reality is...
...anything shipped in the last three, four years is pretty much IPv6 capable.
There are very few exceptions at the core of the network.
Firewall vendors and load balancers are now...
...finally, this year, starting to come out with the appropriate hardware...
...so those parts of the network are now coming back in line...
...with the commercial-grade requirements that we have.
Finally, the desktops: well, guess what?
Your desktop network is ready for IPv6 today.
It's done. There are definitely a few applications that still need porting...
...but pretty much, desktop-wise, that's an easy task as well.
So what's left to do?
The customers.
Just telling them our story, other people telling them the right story.
The network is ready.