Transitioning to IPV6

What was anticipated from the late 1980’s actually took until 2015 to fully occur – the depletion of the unallocated IPv4 addresses. Top level exhaustion occurred in January, 2011.  Four of the five Regional Internet Registries (RIR’s) had exhausted their unallocated IPv4 addresses by late 2015, beginning in April 2011 for Asia Pacific and ending with North America in September, 2015.  For organizations that support a growing client base and continued expansion of IP-enabled devices, the transition to IPv6 has started.

Stitching Together IPv4 & IPv6

There are a number of different technologies available to help organizations manage the transition to an all-IPv6 world while still supporting legacy IPv4 customers and internet content.

These include running a dual stack network, which can be extremely expensive,  or using tunneling technologies to run a single protocol stack while encapsulating the other protocol within, which requires client site deployment and creates a more complex network.

The Reverse Lookup Challenge

A second and more subtle challenge during a transition to IPv6 is the difficulty in supporting traditional reverse lookups (for PTR records).  In addition to being a best practice, support for reverse lookups is essential for a number of applications including spam filtering. Deploying reverse records in an IPv6 world can be much more challenging because of the much larger address space involved. If each unique IP address requires a reverse record in the DNS, a moderate-sized network may require so many reverse DNS records that they simply cannot be physically stored on the disk or in memory on any server.

The Reverse Lookup Answer

For organizations that need to support reverse lookups in an IPv6 network, Secure64 DNS Authority offers the ability to dynamically generate reverse records according to user defined syntax rules. This approach enables reverse lookups without requiring massive amounts of disk and/or memory to be available to the server to store static PTR records.

A Single Network Solution

For many service providers, NAT64 + DNS64 = the ideal solution to transition to IPv6. These technologies allow an organization to deploy a single IPv6 networking protocol to the client while still providing client access to both IPv4 and IPv6 Internet.

Secure64 DNS Cache is an always available, highly secure DNS caching server with built-in support for DNS64, and is compatible with leading, third-party NAT64 solutions. This solution offers a number of advantages over alternative IPv6 transition technologies:

  • Reduces capital costs associated with supporting two networks

  • Reduces operating costs by simplifying network administration

  • Reduces latency compared to tunneling technologies

  • Eliminates the need to purchase grey-market IPv4 addresses to fuel growth

  • Eliminates the need for a second migration away from IPv4-based solutions like dual stack or 6RD