V6 World Congress 2012 – day 2

A marathon day
Day 2 of the IPv6 conference was actually pretty good. It was a ‘marathon’ day of +10hrs of presentations and panel discussions. Unfortunately during the last ‘talking heads’ sessions the best part of me already left the building and concentration dropped. Nonetheless it was a good day and the welcome drinks+bites at the end of the day were rewarding Image may be NSFW.
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The opening speech
was done by John Curran, the founder and president of ARIN (the American Internet Registrar, the equivalent of the European RIPE organization). John was involved in IPng the early RFCs of what eventually became known as IPv6. How cool is that!?

My colleague Erwin Blekkenhorst (maintainer of IPv6.net) also tweeted a lot of interesting remarks and sound bites. Follow ‘@ipv6dotnet’ for getting those tweets.

During the panel discussions several companies shared their views and experiences on the IPv6 implementation and IPv4 to IPv6 transition. Better said co-existence or ‘dual stack’ providing your services via IPv4 and IPv6 in parallel.

I will not bore you with an exhaustive summary (send me a message and I will) of each presentation but I’d like to condense it into a) it’s interesting and worthwhile being at this conference and b) I feel that this is the environment were ‘it’ actually happens; the Internet industry adopting IPv6.

My conclusions
of the second day would be:

1. Moving from IPv4 to IPv6 is inevitable. Not being part of it is basically ‘missing the boat’ and loosing the competitive advantage.
2. Be prepared before actually implementing IPv6. Have a sound strategy resp implementation plan.
3. Implementing IPv6 is a ‘journey‘. Take it on a step by step basis and learn as you go and grow.
4. Despite many (hw or sw) vendors say that they support IPv6 they do not always interact as you’d expect.
5. So in addition; try before you die (i.e. perform a POC ensuring that your design is providing what you aim for. Feed the findings back to the hw/sw vendors.
6. Expect to spend a lot of time on awareness and training. Knowledge on IPv6 is the critical success factor.
7. From a Schuberg Philis IPv6 Task Force perspective we seem to be aligned with what the industry as a whole is doing; we are part of the IPv6 community for some time now and are already enabled on connectivity level. Application layer IPv6 is our next challenge.
8. I believe it is important that Schuberg Philis and our customers who are able to participate are part of the IPv6 World Day June 6, 2012. Let’s go for it!
   The FUTURE is NOW!

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.