IPv6 and the Business-Case Skeptics 297
Julie188 writes "Experts keep screaming that the IPv4 sky is falling. Three such experts were recently asked point-blank to state an irrefutable business case for moving to IPv6 now, and their answer was more plausible than the old refrain (the lack of addresses and a yet-to-be-seen killer IPv6 app). They said that there isn't a business case. No company that is satisfied with all of its Internet services will need to move, even in the next few years. They also pointed out that Microsoft is a unique position in the industry both causing and hindering IPv6 adoption — causing through its IPv6 support in its OSes, and hindering by not extending IPv6 support into very many of its apps."
Here's mine: (Score:5, Interesting)
"Boss, I can get an IPv6 tunnel for free so that we can start experimenting and testing. We work with the Department of Defense, and they say that this stuff is important, so with your permission I'd like to spend $0 to start playing with it."
And that's how we came to be on IPv6.
Re:You want a business case? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe you could build a business case around one or more of those, but what you've really got there are just marketing angles.
The question is, how is this going to make/save me money? More specifically, how will it make/save me more money than investing the input capital in some other way?
I'm not saying the business case does or doesn't exist, but until you've tied it to dollars and cents (or better yet NPV), you haven't made what most people would take as a compelling business case.
Consumer rollout (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:You want a business case? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you really can find something that people will advertise to one another because it's IPv6, it could make sense. 20% of ipv6 users is much better than 0.000001% of all internet users, even if only 1% of all internet users are ipv6 users.
I can attest that if you build it, they will not come. I built a free site to help people buy & sell either locally (location based search) or nationally (http://frimp.net) about 4-5 years ago. It doesn't do auctions, but it's free (as opposed to eBay), and easy to use and works everywhere in the US (as opposed to Craigslist).
I didn't really advertise, because I have no real idea how to - I ran an ad in the Dallas Morning News, which got me about 100 new members. I ran some ads on Google, to little effect. I'm not sure whether either ad paid for itself or not.
Anyway, four years later, I have about 2000 people signed up on the site. It's not insignificant, but it's not going to pay back 1% of what I've invested in effort, either.
My point is that if you can come up with some (ugh) gimmick to get people to talk about your whatsit, even if the people who talk about it belong to some very limited group, it can make a big difference. Of course, that assumes that people using ipv6, or people who might be likely to use ipv6, talk to one another.
Similar to climate change (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a bit like saying there is no business case for doing something about climate change. Sure, I can't tell anyone that specific bits of their infrastructure are going to get wiped out by hurricanes, or that particular segments of their markets are going to be bankrupted and / or drowned by rising sea levels, but that doesn't mean it's not a good idea.
Similarly, I can't forecast what the oil price is going to do, whether it will be higher or lower in 12 months time than it is now. I don't know when we will hit peak oil, or if we've hit it already, and I don't know the exact consequences of that. But that certainly doesn't mean that looking at ways of reducing energy requirements, and alternative sources for them, isn't a good idea.
I can't say what will happen as IPv4 address scarcity hits. Will people be denied allocations outright? I doubt it. Will small blocks of addresses in random parts of the address space be auctioned to the highest bidders? Seems more likely. Will dealing with the huge routing tables caused by all those disconnected little blocks put stress on routers, causing reliability issues and more money to be spent on upgrades? Quite possibly. Will we see people rolling out multiple layers of NAT, and all sorts of ugly application-helpers? Probably. Will it be reliable? I doubt it.
Times are hard economically now, and as a result people pull their horns in and look for hard, specific reasons to justify effort and expenditure, particularly immediate, short-term reasons. But short-termism got us into the current (economic) mess in the first place. Step back, look at the big picture. Yes, it's fuzzy. That doesn't mean there aren't obvious trends, obvious problems -- and also some reasonably obvious, big-picture solutions.
Re:Not exactly true (Score:3, Interesting)
What happens when that company wants to setup a VPN to another company that also uses the 10.0.0.0 address space? Now I need a NATNAT device that invents a whole new set of addresses to let machines inside the two private networks talk to each other.
I'm not saying that everyone needs to be directly on the Internet with a public address and no firewall. But even if you are going to assign private addresses internally, there's value in having (or being able to easily obtain) a globally unique address so that you can form arbitrary connections to any other machine on the planet.
Re:Consumer rollout (Score:2, Interesting)
I use NAT for security (as a firewall)
No you don't. A stateless NAT is almost worthless as a firewall, even if many people think it is. For example, take these three pseudocode rules:
That's all well and good until someone sending you spoofed packets from ns1.google.com:53 to 192.168.0.2 (or whatever your desktop's address is). After all, your firewall allows in all packets with a report port 53.
If you want a firewall, get a firewall. If you want NAT, get NAT. Do not believe for a second that they're the same.
Re:You want a business case? (Score:3, Interesting)
You might also want to ask "technology architects" rather than "technology experts."
Some people are very good at learning the details of existing technologies, and figuring out how to mangle them to solve tomorrow's problems. Other people take a broader view and wonder how to solve next year's problems by creating new technologies. Both have their place, and there must equivalents on the "business" side of a business - people who try to foresee major economic events, the birth of whole new markets, etc. The fact that IPv6 is in many ways a "plumbing" issue (oops, made another tubes allusion) doesn't mean that long-term thinking isn't called for, even if many businesses aren't used to it in respect of (IT) infrastructure.
(Incidentally, the analogy to real architecture works quite well, I think. Sometimes "vision" is called for when creating new buildings, a whole fresh design; other times the traditional way of doing things, a design that has slowly accreted over the years, is fine.)
Availability of hardware (Score:3, Interesting)
So until then they won't be pushing IPv6 although it is available and even supported for the curious and brave.
Re:IP4 - elegant IP6 - Rube Goldberg (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree with the person who said elsewhere that NAT solves this problem much more neatly than IPv6. How many routable addresses do you really need, even at the biggest companies? It surely can't be that many (1000, tops?), and for the rest, you can use the 10.0.0.0 block, and use NAT. I can't imagine that having 16 million addresses for your internal network wouldn't be sufficient.
That's what I feel is the important take away from this. the big Telcom guys might need it, but little ole me on this desktop in my house can care less. My ISP might need my router to be IPv6 compatible so they can interface with many more clients. Maybe my Cel Phone will need it in the future? But from behind a router, I'm always going to run IPV4 inside my networks because they're easier to understand and IPv6 doesn't give me any additional benefit when my 10.6 network is "all that I'll ever need." Right?
Re:You want a business case? (Score:3, Interesting)