The topic covers the following topics:
■ Determining where to begin: An enterprise needs to analyze the benefits, costs, risks, and other business factors and technology considerations that, together, all help determine the initial starting point.
■ Planning a pilot: The pilot phase of an IPv6 deployment is crucial because it exposes training, equipment, design, and technology gaps.
■ Planning an address allocation: The pilot phase enables experimentation of addressing internally, but at some point, you need to obtain global IPv6 addressing from a regional registry and your service providers.
Moving toward an IPv6 deployment requires careful planning, network design considerations, and training for the network administrators. To deal with many of the challenges of deploying IPv6, you need to perform an assessment of the existing network, which includes product compliance. This topic provides you with a framework to outline step-by-step predeployment and deployment considerations, thereby reducing the risk involved in integrating IPv6 in the existing infrastructure without much business impact.
Organizations should identify the reasons to adopt IPv6 in the enterprise, including the drivers and business requirements. It should link IPv6 interoperability to specific business objectives.
Early adoption of IPv6 creates a competitive advantage for an organization. It strengthens its position and increases the flexibility in provisioning innovative services. Other reasons to deploy IPv6 include the following:
■ The need for address space to support the explosion of Internet-enabled devices and proliferation of peer-to-peer, always-on applications
■ Respond to external pressures of IPv4 address exhaustion
■ Business continuity
■ Government policies to implement IPv6
■ Customer demands
■ Global communications
■ Migration of supply chains to IPv6
After determining that an enterprise needs to deploy IPv6, some key benefits tasks should be analyzed. This benefit analysis provides better justification of this large-scale effort.
Benefit Analysis
Organizations should analyze the benefits gained by deploying IPv6, including what lines of business and business programs benefit by transitioning to IPv6.
Organizations need to determine whether deploying IPv6 will increase or maintain business revenue. Commonly, enterprises take either a defensive or offensive approach to IPv6. A defensive approach would be if the enterprise cannot realize an immediate benefit from IPv6 deployment, but yet it wants to be prepared if some new business or technology driver comes along. One example of this is when an enterprise wants to ensure that a potential customer, who might end up with an IPv6-enabled or IPv6-only device, can still reach the enterprise’s public-facing websites. This is a defensive tactic to ensure business continuity. Offensively, transitioning to IPv6 can increase revenue by introducing new service opportunities or decreasing the cost of maintaining existing services.
On the technical side, deploying IPv6 can eliminate the need to configure "workarounds" such as tunnels and Network Address Translation (NAT). This improves network performance and greatly simplifies operations. IPv6 exhibits numerous technical features that, when compared to IPv4, make it a more powerful and flexible framework to deploy future network applications and services. In brief, the key features of IPv6 protocols are as follows:
■ Increased number of IP addresses: IPv6 enables billions of new devices to be connected over the Internet, such as mobile devices, consumer electronics, sensors, transportation-monitoring equipment, and so on.
■ Autoconfiguration: IPv6 standards describe techniques that enable IPv6-ready hosts to set their (networking) operational parameters and automatically can establish communication channels with other hosts.
■ Security: The standards mandate the support of IP (layer) Security (IPsec) at all IPv6-enabled hosts, enabling the secure exchange of digital information.
■ Mobility: The Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) model is simpler than its IPv4 counterpart.
■ Multicast: Multicasting is widely used in IPv6 networks and improves the efficiency of communications among multiple hosts. Also, the expansion of (IPv6) multicast address space and the explicit address scoping simplify the provisioning of multicast services.
■ Extension headers: The support of extension headers enables protocol-level information to be carried in addition to the basic IPv6 header.
■ Reduced operational cost: The deployment of IPv6 protocols can reduce the management overhead of future networks.
The large address space, the removal of NAT gateways, the autoconfiguration features, the integrated support of IPsec, and mobility are some key factors that lead to a reduction in operational costs.
Cost Analysis
Organizations also must analyze what costs are associated with deploying IPv6 transition. For example:
■ Designing and engineering (including planning, system engineering, design, testing, implementation, and deployment)
■ Changes or upgrades in infrastructure that might include
■ Hardware and software, which include servers, PCs, and possibly all IT equipment
■ Applications
■ Operational support systems
■ Recurring cost of training in skills associated with IPv6 and interworking between IPv4 and IPv6
■ Operational/support costs after deployment starts
To summarize, the gradual deployment of IPv6 in an organization requires monetary investment. IPv6 features can be added at minimal incremental costs during normal hardware or software replacement cycles. After the IPv6 supporting infrastructure is ready, dual-stack can be used to support a gradual transition from IPv4 to IPv6. In addition to hardware and software, costs can include incremental and recurring expenditures and activities associated with IPv6 deployment.
Investing in an early IPv6 adoption by, for example, upgrading the installed base and increasing the technical expertise in the organization can be high, if not planned for ahead. Similarly, high investments are required when an organization is forced because of market conditions to deploy IPv6 in a short period of time, for example, because of infrastructure upgrades that are not aligned with equipment life cycles. There can be an optimal period of deploying IPv6 in an organization where capital costs are minimized. In most cases, IPv6 can be deployed in a very cost-effective manner as part of a natural procurement cycle, but if IPv6-specific requirements are not included in the procurement process, additional costs can arise if a quick migration is later required.
Risks
Identify risks associated with deploying IPv6, which could include business, legal, or technical risks. For each of the risks identified, there should be mitigating actions that can be used to minimize or prevent those risks, for example:
■ Business risks: Can we achieve the identified benefits and the return on investment? Can the organization continue to grow with the IPv6 deployment? There is another way to look at the business risk. Deployment of IPv6 can be considered in terms of infrastructure maintenance, much like the upgrade of an old public branch exchange (PBX) that is out of support but still meeting current business requirements. The impact of not maintaining infrastructure is an increase in business risk and sometimes an increase in support costs. Deploying IPv6 is a risk mitigation project. It might not generate revenue immediately, but it might in the future prevent revenue loss.
■ Legal risks: Unique identifiers exist in IPv6 addresses that can provide the potential to track network activity. This can be privacy risk, and therefore network operators must be aware of any legal requirements to safeguard the privacy of their users.
■ Technical risks: Security risks can develop if IPv6 and the associated transition mechanisms are not implemented or managed properly. Different transition mechanisms have different technical risks. Some security devices might not provide IPv6 detection or filtering capability, which might open windows of attack. Risk of interoperability needs to be checked for possible interaction issues with other IPv6 stacks, for example, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) or mobility protocols.
Business Case
Deploying a new technology must meet the following business needs:
■ Yield cost savings
■ Create or enhance revenue streams
■ Generate a competitive or strategic advantage
In the economic climate today, IT decisions are viewed by their return on investment (ROI). While ROI is meant to be a precise measurement, it fails to capture the following factors:
■ Risks
■ Complexity
■ Intangibles
The preceding factors, along with the ROI, need to be captured in the business case to deploy IPv6. The business case also needs to capture financial measures such as cost savings and revenue streams. The business case should highlight major program activities, specific solutions, and impacts.
Transition Team
Establish a team of people, called the transition group, to oversee the IPv6 deployment effort. After it is established, the team can plan, coordinate, and communicate the progress of IPv6 deployment throughout the entire organization. The team can also ensure that resources (for example, staffing, training, budget, and so on) are adequately allocated to complete all identified tasks within schedule. This team is especially critical in large, distributed organizations.
The organization identifies the members of the team and clearly defines their roles and responsibilities. The members can be from different departments such as applications, network, and other business groups. Typically network administrators, system administrators, software developers, and support technicians would be working with a project manager or a team of project managers.
The team also needs to build awareness of IPv6 within the organization. Employees should know what IPv6 is, how it impacts their work areas, and why it is important to the organization as a whole.
The transition group should have executive authority within the organization to sponsor the transition program and set policy. This can provide a significant boost to the overall priority of the transition program when competing for resources.
The team can identify the areas that can be impacted by deploying IPv6 within the enterprise network. This can be achieved by defining milestones to be completed within a schedule and individual owners of tasks.
Individual working groups within the team address separate areas. A lead should be assigned to each group. The transition group can also establish the objectives for the working team and ensure that each working team is staffed and trained appropriately and sufficiently.
Metrics needs to be defined to track transition progress. This would provide the confidence to executive management that milestones outlined in the business case are being achieved.
The transition team needs to develop and communicate clear policy and enforcement procedures to ensure that all impacted areas within an enterprise include IPv6 in their future plans. IPv6 policies should be released and emphasized on a timely basis. Identify methods or tools for review and enforcement of policies. An example of an IPv6 policy could be that all future procurements should be of IPv6-capable/ready assets only. An example of an enforcement procedure could be that only business cases for IPv6-compliant projects will be approved.
An overall comprehensive IPv6 deployment plan needs to be developed for the entire organization to ensure that all IPv6 plans are synchronized, consistent, and prioritized.
After the business plan is executed, the transition team needs to provide periodic communication of the progress of IPv6 transition throughout the enterprise.
Training
In a large enterprise, both the business and technical aspects of deploying IPv6 training might be necessary to initiate and maintain IPv6 readiness. Depending on the role of the personnel in the organization, the type of training can vary. Following is a sample of training categories:
■ Awareness training: This type of training provides an overview of IPv6 technologies, a basic understanding of the IPv6 technology, and business drivers, deployment issues, and potential applications and devices enabled by IPv6.
■ Architectural training: This type of training is for individuals who have primary responsibilities in architecting, designing, and deploying IPv6.
■ Operational training: This training is for individuals who have primary responsibilities in supporting a deployed IPv6 network.
■ Specialized training: This training is for Subject Matter Experts (SME) who work in a particular technology area (for example, Mobility, Security, and so on).
