IPv6

Features

• Expert to IT pros: Adopt IPv6 soon or be sorry later

  A dozen of the world's largest Internet companies - including Facebook, Google and Comcast - have committed to June 6, as the start date for their production deployments of IPv6, an upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol.

• Hackers target IPv6

  If your IPv6 strategy is to delay implementation as long as you can, you still must address IPv6 security concerns right now.

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  Sound the death knell for IPv4

  2011 marks the death of Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) but companies and ISPs are largely yet to deploy its successor, IPv6. James Hutchinson looks at the state of the market and what is holding the new protocol back.

• IPv6: Everything you need to know

  All the news, features, tips and tricks you might need to ensure your company gets off the ground on IPv6, before it's too late.

• Are your networks ready for the cutover to IPv6?

  The Internet is running out of the equivalent of phone numbers - familiar problem, non-trivial solution.

• Four ways IPv6 will save the Internet

  The world is almost out of IP addresses--or at least it's almost out of the IPv4 addresses that IT admins and users are most familiar with. Fortunately, IPv6 has been developed to exponentially expand the pool of available IP addresses while also providing a few other benefits.

• Google's leading, but where do other Web giants stand on IPv6?

  The most popular Web sites are under increasing pressure to add support for IPv6, a long-anticipated upgrade to IPv4, the Internet's main communications protocol.

• Will 2010 be the year of IPv6?

  Will IPv6 finally arrive stateside in 2010? That's the question U.S. ISPs and network equipment vendors are asking themselves after seeing a rise in IPv6 activity during the last six months of 2009.

• Invisible IPv6 traffic poses serious network threat

  IPv6 -- the next-generation Internet protocol -- isn't keeping too many U.S. CIOs and network managers up worrying at night. But perhaps it should.

• What's driving this university to IPv6? Going green

  Ave Maria University, a liberal arts college near Naples, Fla., is looking to adopt IPv6 across its two data centers and all of its facilities management systems, which are used for monitoring building access, temperature control and power management. The goal: improved energy conservation across its campus.

• IPv6 security guru fields questions

  Although he acknowledges that businesses have yet to embrace IPv6, security guru Scott Hogg says that doesn't mean IT executives can ignore the security problems that the next generation Internet protocol can present. After all, he notes, operating systems such as Microsoft Vista and Linux are already IPv6 capable and thus any networks that use them might be handling IPv6 traffic without their operators' knowledge.

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  The Internet sky really is falling

  Many folks are familiar with the modeling we've done over the past few years highlighting the fact that Internet demand is outstripping capacity, specifically access capacity. The findings were, to put it mildly, controversial: We've been called everything from carrier shills to nut-jobs. (No, the research wasn't sponsored. And we never claimed your fillings were receiving extraterrestrial radio signals).

• The 5 best router and switch features you never use

  It's been said that Microsoft Word users only exploit 10% of the software's capabilities.

• Fatal flaw for IPv6: It's not backwards compatible

  The Internet engineering community says its biggest mistake in developing IPv6 - a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol - is that it lacks backwards compatibility with the existing Internet Protocol, known as IPv4.