The Number Resource Organization (NRO) was formed by the global Internet community to oversee and manage unallocated Internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses. On January 19th, the NRO announced that less than 10% of unallocated IPv4 address space remains, marking this a “critical moment” in the pending exhaustion of Internet addressing.
IP addressing is the method used to identify devices and applications on the Internet, including everything from laptop computers, to mobile phones, to network routing devices. Rule of thumb is if you can connect to something via the Internet, it has an IPv4 address. And the available addresses (around 4.2 billion) are forecast to be exhausted in 2012.
The answer is implementation of Internet Protocol version 6, which extends the potential Internet address expansion by trillions. For people who really care, the difference between IPv4 address space and IPv6 address space is the difference between a 32 (232) bit number and a 128 (2128) bit number.
Cloud Computing and IPv6
Cloud computing allows dynamic, on-demand, and elastic generation of both virtual infrastructure, and virtual machines running over the infrastructure. Whether physical, or virtual, each machine or application still requires an IP address.
Add all the new mobile phones, VoIP phones, intelligent GRIDs (imagine every electrical device in your home being Internet-enabled), and anything else that can be electronically tagged, you can see why we need to consider the relationship of clouds and IPv6 as a high priority for the cloud computing industry.
The trick is to make implementation of IPv6 easy not only for the end users – it should be near transparent, but also for network administrators and applications developers. End users don’t want to know, or need to know the complexities of network and device addressing. They just want their device to work over the Internet.
Administrators need to know this is not a punitive or limiting requirement, but rather a improvement enabling more rapid development of new applications and network architectures. And of course offer better than existing network and data security.
Future applications and services within clouds will require a much broader use of Internet-enabled resources. Whether it is automatically spooling additional servers, adding disk, or more complex functions such as global distributed processing, load-balancing, disaster recovery, and follow-the-sun dynamic resource allocations – IPv6 implementation is required to meet that demand.
Cloud computing as a concept supports all such processing models, and IPv6 will extend the ability of the global Internet to support the concepts and vision.
Perhaps the most intimidating requirement facing network administrators is the requirement to “restack” their entire infrastructure as an IPv6 network, while still supporting legacy IPv4 within their architecture.
The goal of all cloud providers is to insulate application administrators from the complexity of understanding IPv6, thus further encouraging aggressive adoption of IPv6 addressing. If the administrator is relieved to concentrate efforts on designing the application, scaling compute, network, and storage for his market or users, then the cloud service providers have done their job. And that job is ensuring the Internet continues to serve the needs of a global connected community.
ScaleUp Technologies is an early innovator implementing IPv6 as a standard feature in cloud deployments. Using 3Tera’s AppLogic VPN appliance, ScaleUp Technologies is able to deliver an advanced infrastructure that allows not only on-demand automatic configuration of IPv6 within the customer system, but also near transparent distribution of both processing and backup capacity which spans geographies.
A first step in the big picture, but an important step in providing industry leadership promoting not only adoption of IPv6, but also ensuring the transition to IPv6 is less intimidating to the cloud user community.
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