Get Ready World, IPv6 is Coming
F5 a Participant in Worldwide IPv6 Field Trial—June 8, 2011
What did F5 Do for World IPv6 Day?
On June 8, 2011, F5 Networks® participated in World IPv6 Day alongside some of the biggest names on the Internet such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and Akamai. The day marked the first official field trial for Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). To show our support, we enabled global IPv6 connectivity to www.F5.com.
What Did Visitors Experience?
People who visited www.F5.com on June 8 from IPv6-only enabled devices were automatically using our IPv6 network connectivity. Users who accessed our site from IPv4 devices experienced no change. As expected, our Internet content was fully operational on both IPv6-only and dual-stacked client devices. Understandably, we could not guarantee the availability of third-party content that was linked to from www.f5.com or content that was subject to legal restrictions. We hope you enjoyed browsing our IPv6 site.
What’s so Important about the Transition to IPv6?
Since 1981, IPv4 has been the standard Internet communication protocol. Due to the rapid growth of the Internet, the number of addresses available has diminished. Earlier in 2011, the final IPv4 addresses were allocated to the Regional Internet Registries (RIR) and the Internet Society predicts that RIR address pools will be depleted in approximately one year. Once this happens, many new applications and services may only support IPv6, or will require additional technology to enable IPv6 clients to reach IPv4 hosts, and vice versa.
There are many reasons to begin to use the IPv6 public network, not the least of which is the limited number of addresses available in the IPv4 network space. Importantly, the IPv6 standard also includes many new features such as increased security and reliability. Furthermore, many organizations around the world have already begun to embrace IPv6. Thus, organizations that do not understand and support the new standard will eventually experience limited global connectivity, as they will be effectively ignoring the owners of devices that only support IPv6.
F5 Supports Customers through IPv6 Transition
F5 BIG-IP® Application Delivery Controllers, used by many organizations to manage traffic among data centers and servers, also function as IPv4 to IPv6 gateways. F5 has provided IPv6 network capabilities since 2004, when we released version 9.0 of F5’s TMOS operating system. TMOS is based on IPv6 and includes native IPv6 to IPv4 gateway capabilities. The BIG-IP IPv6 gateway provides complete translation and load balancing between IPv6 and IPv4 networks in both directions, and it directs traffic across mixed IPv4 and IPv6 devices.
The BIG-IP system helps enterprise customers expand into the IPv6 space—on their terms—by enabling them to immediately support a dual stack network, avoiding the need to invest in costly changes to their applications or server infrastructure today. While maintaining a presence in IPv4, they can take gradual steps toward making their applications available on the IPv6 network. This ability to transition gradually is important because many clients will still need to use IPv4 communication to connect to public resources.
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