Ittechtips.com’s Blog

How does “supply chain optimization” equate to “green technology”, and how is IPv6 involved? Supply chain optimization solutions help automate supply chains operations, making them more efficient, eliminating unnecessary waste, warehouse surplus storage costs, and shipping cost, and as an additional benefit - more energy efficient and environmentally friendly operations. There are several ways to apply information technology to cutting costs and greening the supply chain. These include optimizing the physical supply chain process, eliminating unneeded storage/warehousing, pinpointing shipping to reduce transportation costs, and lowering energy usage in the manufacturing process. Most manufacturing companies can deploy sensors, process automation controllers, transportation automation systems, and asset tracking solutions to substantially reduce energy cost and pollution in production, transportation, and inventory storage costs in supply channels.   Supply chain monitoring can be combined with modeling and simulation to help factor in the cost and benefits of alternative transportation methods, fuel costs, and carbon-trading decisions. Think Netcentric automation, controllers, sensors, and decision systems and you start to understand the power of connecting everything across the emerging “IPv6 Internet of things.”  IPv6, on top of a few key technologies like M2MXML, web-services (SOAP+XML), SOA, and Zeroconfiguration services discovery, is what we call the 6SenseIT^TM framework for creating netcentric system of applications, sensors, asset tracking, and system controllers involved in green supply chain.  

Need an example of how to apply green supply chain? Here’s a few:

· By monitoring point of sales, trending sales with location based information, and optimizing for just-in-time production and pinpointed shipping, most supply chains can lower the cost and green impact of getting products to the points of consumption while improving delivery times and customer service.

·Wal-Mart is utilizing sensors and IT tools to measure the amount of energy used to create products throughout its supply chain, including the procurement, manufacturing, and distribution process to make its entire supply chain more energy efficient.

· SC Johnson’s transportation-logistics optimization project led to eliminating 2000 trucks and reducing 168,000 gallons of fuel consumed annually by sub-optimal product transportation.

Supply chain optimization doesn’t just apply to the manufacturing and shipping industries, it is a useful tool for reducing cost and ‘greening’ operations in sectors such as government, military logistics, education and services delivery.

If you’re involved in network operations, architecture planning, or IPv6 address  management for a Federal agency this blog post covers an issue you should understand about IPv6 multi-homing. Many organizations depend upon multihomed Internet connectivity to support critical applications and pursue the “holy grail of “five 9s” or 99.999% uptime. One popular approach for adding fault tolerance and physical diversity to improve Internet connectivity is to connect to more than one Internet service provider (ISP), a technique called multi-homing. Multi-homing eliminates a single point of failure by providing two or more ISP connections to help ensure continuous connectivity. However, your multi-homing strategy and IPv6 addressing must be carefully planned to ensure that you actually improve connectivity for your company. We see many government agencies and commercial enterprises, who’s IT staff and consultants are not familiar with these subtleties, getting the wrong IPv6 allotments to support effective enterprise multi-homing, especially when the organization has multiple physical locations. I recently saw some US Federal agencies present their IPv6 migration strategy at the DGI “Realizing IPv6” Conference and I realized that their addressing and multi-homing strategies are probably not compatible and may cause future problems with the TIC Initiative. I’ve asked TJ Evans,  one of our top consultants on addressing and routing, to comment on the problem:

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TJ Evans comments:

• Many agencies are getting a /32, “ISP-sized allocation” which they can break into a huge number of internal subnets and , able to be advertised the aggregated address space out to multiple ISPs  from their
  Enterprise headquarters.
• However – if an enterprise has multiple locations – like mot geographically diverse agencies, a problem arises in that you cannot advertise less-than the whole /32 without possibly running afoul of the “forced aggregation” world of the we live in today in the Internet core. 
• This means that your traffic may get delivered to SiteB when it is really destined for SiteA, and it is up to you to establish your own Intranet  routing backbone between the sites to shuttle this traffic to the correct site
• As we have learned from our own transition and multi-site multihoming strategy – we would have been better off with a large provider-independent IPv6 allocation of something like a /44 than our original ISP-sized /32
  •  /32 = no way to break this up between multiple sites
  •  /44 = 4 bits of “subnetting”, yielding multiple /48s for up to 16 regional offices

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If you get a /48 Provider Independent (PI) address assignment, you can be facing the same problem. Like many of the IPv6 best practices, we’re actively developing these techniques as we go, since Command Information has done actual Enterprise IPv6 rollouts for ourselves,  commercial enterprise & ISP clients, and government agencies. We often know of these emerging  issues long before you may see it documented into industry best practice guidance.

So – what do you do to address this issue if you  need to modify your address allocation? Our best advice is to engage consultants, whoever you can find, that have actual operational and hands-on experience with designing and operating IPv6 enterprise and carrier networks. It’s cheaper in the long run to engage someone who can share the answers in the back of the book to architect your next-generation IT solutions and train your in-house staff/contractors . . . or open the book at page one and start reading…..