posted on Monday, January 23, 2012 6:51 AM
#mobile #IPv6 Mobile devices. Plants. Cars. Cows. It’s time to get serious about that move to IPv6.
Until recently the motivation for migrating from IPv4 to IPv6 has been, well, less than urgent. If consumerization hasn’t been enough of an impetus to get you seriously thinking about migration, maybe the reality that even cows are now being Internet-enabled might. (Check out the infographic linked below for the story)
There has been some contention about the number of connected things and by when. Cisco's prediction of 50 billion devices by 2020 matches Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg's prediction earlier this year within a similar time period. However IBM recently put it at 1 trillion connected devices by 2015. Indeed in April 2010, Cisco's own CTO Padmasree Warrior said that by 2013 the number of devices connected to the Internet will reach 1 trillion.
Cisco: 50 Billion Things on the Internet by 2020 [Infographic]
But if that’s not enough to convince you, let’s just do some pure mathematics. Even if we take the lowest of predictions, 50 billion, and we compare that to the maximum number of IP addresses allowed by IPv4 - 2^32 - the result is a number less than 50 billion.
2^32 = 4,294,967,296 < 50B
That’s reality. What you might not have known, however, is that major providers have long since announced they will stop offering IPv4 addresses to smartphones around the end of … 2011. Which if you recall was about, oh, four weeks ago.
AT&T, Verizon and others have announced that they will stop offering IPv4 addresses to smartphones around the end of 2011. So, even if your corporate network has plenty of IPv4 addresses, your employees may find themselves without connectivity unless there’s full IPv6 support for their mobile devices.
-- Enterprise IPv6 Transition
Whether providers have or have not stopped offering IPv4 addresses already isn’t as important as the fact that in the very near future they will, because they will have no other options. Moving forward with such rapid growth in the number of, as Cisco put it, “things” connected to the Internet, the only option is migration to IPv6 – and sooner rather than later.
What’s missing from discussions about “things” connected to the Internet is what they’re connecting to. While Twitter-enabled plants are certainly amusing, the impact to the enterprise is unsurprisingly minimal. Or at least it seems that way…
IMPACT on the ENTERPRISE
The impact to enterprise IT organizations comes from being forced to support IPv6 sooner rather than later by providers pushing out IPv6 out of necessity. It comes from needing to somehow support IPv6-requiring mobile devices in their quest to access critical corporate resources while not within the confines of the internal, IPv4 network. The fact that cows and plants and things are increasingly connected to the Internet means that the day when your employees are assigned IPv6 addresses on their smart phones and tablets and may no longer be able to access corporate resources remotely will be more quickly upon you.
The need to support not only the mobile device platforms but their networking mechanisms has been on F5’s radar for some time. It’s not just enough to support the platform if you don’t support the network. That’s why it was satisfying to see Gartner place F5 in the leaders quadrant for SSL VPN, recognizing its dedication and focus on supporting mobile client platforms natively like iOS and Android as well as its leadership in supporting IPv6 to ensure those mobile clients can access corporate resources remotely regardless of their networking stack.
F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) and Edge Gateway are already IPv6 ready. Drawing on the IPv6 gateway capabilities of F5’s core platform technology, TMOS, BIG-IP APM and Edge Gateway are fully IPv6 ready and able to support mobile devices (and cows, too) assigned IPv6 addresses.
The ability of an SSL VPN to support IPv6 will quickly be of utmost importance for organizations desiring to continue supporting the needs of its remote users accessing resources via mobile devices.
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