State's IPv6 struggles a lesson for rest of world

One of India's states is far behind on IPv6 adoption

By Donna Donnowitz
August 4, 2011
In India, all state and central government organizations are expected to migrate completely to the IPv6 protocol by the end of March 2012. Throughout the process, a variety of auditing groups will be sent throughout the country to track progress and keep all of the projects on task. According to a recent IBN Live report, the state of Kerala has fallen behind in IPv6 adoption and will not be ready to pass early audits.

The state's troubles stem from the fact that it has yet to assess the status of its IT infrastructure and evaluate which systems are inherently compatible with IPv6 and which will need to be upgraded or replaced to work with the new protocol, the report said.

A state official with Kerala's IT mission told the news source the migration process has fallen behind the mandatory timeline.

"Kerala cannot meet with the proposed timeline because we have not yet started the inventory of machines," the official told IBN Live. "We have to procure new appliances and deploy IPv6 complaint equipment. Security angle mock drill of IPv6 addresses and parallel run of both addresses should also be held. It is also necessary to ensure that there is no problem in migrating critical addresses like that of the police."

The official went on to tell the news source that Kerala plans to establish its IPv6 infrastructure in such a way that the network will default back to IPv4 if any problems occur. Initiating this process and handling all of the other migration steps is expected to take long enough to make the state's transition to IPv6 go beyond the amount of time officially allowed by the federal government's plan.

Evaluating how a company needs to adjust internal hardware and software for IPv6 compatibility is among the first steps toward successful migration. A recent Network World report said assessing hardware and software to identify their current capabilities is the first thing companies should do to prepare for IPv6. Once this has been accomplished businesses can use the knowledge gleaned from the process to develop the best strategy to upgrade hardware and configure systems to handle the new protocol. With a basic strategy in place, budgets can then be adjusted to make room for the entire migration process, according to the report.

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