Key Ingredient in a Successful IPv6 Integration – Guest Blog [Archived]

By Jennifer Bly

What does it take to integrate IPv6 into your network? Jim Bailey describes the major areas you’ll need to focus on while highlighting one virtue you’re going to need at every step along the way.

Guest blog post by Jim Bailey

What do I need for a successful IPv6 integration?  It’s a question that I get quite a bit as I talk with customers that are looking at integrating IPv6 into their networks.  I’ve answered the question in many different ways both technically and business related, but I’ve come to realize that the key piece for a successful integration is…wait for it…patience.  Patience is generally not a feature that is associated with a technical integration project.  Let me explain myself a bit further.

Build the Business Case

One of the first areas of focus for the integration project is to link what you are doing to what the business needs.  This step requires patience because most technical savvy people do not like to build up the dreaded business case.  This step is important because it starts to build consensus across the organization which leads to the next step in the process.

Assemble Your Team

A team needs to be assembled to drive the project.  This team needs representation from all aspects of the IT organization – network engineering/design, security, data center, NOC, applications support/development, OS support, etc.  This step also requires patience because in general these different components in the IT organization are not communicating regularly which means that it can take time to build up the team.  This step is also where having a well thought out business case helps to pull people into the project.

Assess Your Current Environment

Another piece to the integration project is that the current environment has to be assessed for the current capability to support the desired IPv6 features.   This step takes patience because all aspects of the environment need to be evaluated – networking infrastructure (e.g. routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, etc.), operating systems and applications.  This assessment effort takes time and has to be coordinated across all the IT organizations which makes the team building exercise all that more important.

Execute Your IPv6 Implementation

The last piece is to execute.  The project needs to be broken down into phases, an addressing plan needs to be developed, the designs need to be pulled together, testing needs to happen, feature gaps need to be closed, an implementation plan needs to be decided on and the list goes on.  The time it takes to go through the execution is considerable.  Patience is needed to coordinate all of these activities.

The time it is going to take to successfully steer your organization through the planning and execution of an IPv6 integration project is considerable.  The project will also require extensive coordination among several organizations.  The time to start the process is now and keep in mind that patience is needed.

Jim Bailey

Advanced Services Technical Leader

Cisco Systems

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Any views, positions, statements or opinions of a guest blog post are those of the author alone and do not represent those of ARIN. ARIN does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness or validity of any claims or statements, nor shall ARIN be liable for any representations, omissions or errors contained in a guest blog post.

Any views, positions, statements or opinions of a guest blog post are those of the author alone and do not represent those of ARIN. ARIN does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness or validity of any claims or statements, nor shall ARIN be liable for any representations, omissions or errors contained in a guest blog post.