Regional registration agencies have announced that they would run out of IPv4 addresses to assign in the next few months. Service providers will soon start to assign IPv6 addresses to companies that will have no other choice than to adopt the IPv6 format in their infrastructure.

Why you need to start preparing your migration to IPv6

Migration from IPv4 to IPv6 has become a necessity as the pool of available IPv4 addresses will soon be exhausted. By the end of 2011, service providers will have nothing but IPv6 addresses to assign to companies asking for additional addresses. Soon your partners, your customers, your whole environment will migrate to IPv6. In order not to suffer from compatibility issues between IPv4 and IPv6 technologies, it is critical to start preparing the integration of IPv6 in your infrastructure now.

Being IPv6 ready means:

• ensuring your company remains competitive
• preserving your SLA and communication with your customers and partners
• staying visible on the market with an IPv6 compliant website
• guaranteeing your company is capable of sustaining futureable growth and development

Migrating from IPv4 to IPv6 is a long and costly operation. Thinking ahead about it will help you to anticipate your needs, plan and execute the migration while reducing operational costs.

EfficientiP provides solutions to help you go through this major network transition and reduce risks and costs of migrating and managing an IPv6 network.

EfficientIP's solution

There are two main challenges while migrating from IPv4 to IPv6:

• Lengthy addresses: IPv6 addresses format extends to 128 bits and can no longer be managed with a spreadsheet. Configurations and network infrastructure become more complex and are more error prone.
• IPv4 and IPv6 cohabitation: Migration to IPv6-only infrastructures will take several years. This means that, for a while, your network will use both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. IPv6 is not backward compatible with IPv4 and, IPv4 and IPv6 are not interoperable.Your services and equipment will need to support Dual Stack configurations, ensuring compatibility between devices using IPv4 and devices using IPv6 to maintain the availability of the services.

To be ready for IPv6, you need to have a complete overview of your network. You will then be able to build your IPv6 addressing plan and ensure that your equipment (network devices, applications, user client etc.) is compatible with IPv6 technology.

EfficientIP’s SOLIDserver™ solution helps you to face those challenges and guides you through the whole migration process, from the planning to the integration of IPv6 in your infrastructure.

First, SOLIDserver™ discovers all IPv4 addresses present on the network and all devices that are connected. This gives you full visibility of your infrastructure and you can design your new IPv6 architecture and start planning migration. The new IPv6 infrastructure model can be fully programmed into SOLIDserver™ interface and tested in real conditions. Therefore prior to the integration of the new IPv6 addresses, you can anticipate your needs, plan future connections between IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and organize an appropriate deployment planning. Thanks to import templates, SOLIDServer™ is able to easily integrate existing IP address pools, ensuring a fluid migration of the data. When you are ready to migrate to IPv6, you will be able to monitor each step of the deployment, manage tasks delegation and establish regular and strategic reporting.

SOLIDserver™ IPv6 key features

• IPv6 management: with SOLIDserver™, you only configure your IPv6 addresses once. The appliance then manages them through a centralized, web-based interface. It automates and therefore simplifies IPv6 address allocation and subnets management, eliminating the risk of misconfiguration.
• Naming conventions: Integrate your IP resources naming conventions within SOLIDserver™ to apply them according to IP object types, geographical location, services membership or other user-defined criteria.
• IPv6 network visibility: SOLIDserver™ detects IPv4 and IPv6 addresses on your network and centralizes all the data in the interface. You then get global visibility and control over your infrastructure, allowing you to organize your IP addressing plan and your architecture according to your needs, with the ability to include your own IP management rules.
• Dual Stack management: SOLIDserver detects all IPv4 and IPv6 addresses on your network and helps you to implement Dual Stack configurations on your equipment to maintain communication between IPv4 and IPv6 devices.
• DNS service management: SOLIDserver™ supports DNS AAAA and PTR (DNAME) records for IPv6 DNS resolution, as well as ip6.int and ip6.arpa domains. Therefore, it can manage IPv4/IPv6 DNS service.

 

Key benefits of EfficientIP’s solution

• Simplified management: SOLIDserver™ automates most of the complex administrative tasks related to IPv6 addresses.
• Eliminate risks of misconfiguration: automation limits the number of manual interventions and eliminates the risk of misconfigurations.
• Anticipation: Thanks to SOLIDserver™ modeling features, you can design your whole IPv4/IPv6 architecture in the interface and test it in real conditions, therefore anticipating and scheduling the migration according to your exact needs.
• Unified management: SOLIDserver™ allows you to manage your IPAM, DNS and DHCP services from a centralized point ensuring consolidated management and configuration coherency.