Network News

A slew of corporations, government agencies, and universities participated in World IPv6 Day on June 8. In other news, Silver Peak Systems, Inc. released its new and highest-end wireless area network (WAN) optimization appliance. Finally, Cisco Systems, Inc. said it predicts global Internet traffic will quadruple between 2010 and 2015.

Focal Points:

• On June 8, more than 400 corporations, government agencies, and universities participated in World IPv6 Day, serving up content using IPv6 as well as the current IPv4 standard. This large-scale trial, which included companies such as Facebook Inc., Google Inc., and Microsoft Corp., enabled network engineers to gauge the success of IPv6, and to pinpoint technical difficulties that cause delays in Web site access. No major problems were encountered and the first global test passed without incident, according to initial reports. The Internet is running out of addresses using IPv4, with the free pool of unassigned IPv4 addresses having expired in February. Moreover, the Asia Pacific region ran out of all but a few IPv4 addresses on reserve for startups in April, and the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) says it will run out of IPv4 addresses by the fall. Specifically, IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support 4.3 billion devices connected to the Internet; while IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses and can connect a virtually unlimited number of devices. IPv6 also promises faster, less-costly Internet services. However, IPv6 is not backwards compatible with IPv4, which means network engineers will have to upgrade their network equipment and software to support IPv6 traffic.
• Silver Peak released its new NX-10K WAN optimization appliance, designed to speed data replication for disaster recovery. According to the vendor, the new appliance can produce up to 2.5 gigabytes per second (Gbps) of WAN bandwidth, and allows up to 256,000 simultaneous sessions in a server that is one-third the size of competing products. The NX-10K has up to four 10Gbit Ethernet (GBE) ports, as opposed to Silver Peak's previous high-end product, the NX-9000, which had two 10GBE ports. As such, the latest appliance can fully support local access network (LAN)-side demands and provide for highly-available, diversely routed configurations, said Silver Peak. The software also corrects packet delivery issues, prioritizes traffic, and uses traffic shaping policies to guarantee network resources, Silver Peak added. The NX-10K also includes Network Memory, which inspects all traffic at the byte level and stores copies of content in high-capacity, lower-cost disk drives and/or solid-state drives (SSDs), according to the announcement. The NX-10K has a starting list price of $300,000, Silver Peak added.
• Cisco predicted in its fifth "Visual Networking Index Forecast" that the Internet will see explosive growth in connected devices and in traffic. Global traffic will quadruple between 2010 and 2015 and will be 966 exabytes, with an increase by 200 exabytes between 2014 and 2015, said the networking giant. This growth will largely be driven by online video and new devices such as tablets, Cisco added. Cisco predicts that an average of 1 million video minutes will cross the Internet every second during 2015. Moreover, about 6 percent of all Internet traffic will come from tablets in 2015; meaning that tablets will generate more traffic than all connected devices in 2006, said the vendor. Additionally, Cisco predicts that there will be 15 billion network-connected devices, approximately two per person worldwide, with the average U.S. resident having seven networked devices. Cisco also predicted that Wi-Fi traffic would surpass fixed broadband traffic in 2015, and that mobile broadband traffic will be 26 times larger in 2015 than in 2010.

Experton Group believes enterprises can no longer delay action and will have to begin an aggressive effort to prepare for and implement IPv6 within their environments. As early as 2005, Cisco released a report that suggested the pool of available addresses would be exhausted within four to five years but most companies ignored the warning. Cisco's new report envisages exponential growth that will require massive network bandwidth expansion and conversion to IPv6 to prevent traffic from overwhelming networks and systems. IT executives should work toward conversion to IPv6 and consider Cisco's projections within the realm of possibility and consistent with the projected growth of storage capacity expansion, and plan accordingly. This type of growth will require enterprises to employ solutions like Silver Peak's to ensure critical replication of data needed for disaster recovery is completed within the required time frame.