Ittechtips.com’s Blog

Google has taken the advice of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) engineers, American Registry for Internet Numbering (ARIN) (John Curran and company), Google’s own famous “Internet Evangelist” Vint Cerf,  and others that getting external facing servers working on IPv6 is a business continuity issue.There have been numerous warnings from the top experts in the Internet community about the consequences of Internet growth and the need to switch to IPv6:

• “In order to sustain the impressive speed of Internet innovation and ensure a healthy Internet economy for the future, we recommend that content providers make their services available over IPv6,” - Axel Pawlik, Managing Director RIPE NCC. 
• “.. With only 19% of IPv4 address space remaining, ARIN is now compelled to advise the Internet community that migration to IPv6 is necessary for any applications that require ongoing availability of contiguous IP number resources.” –ARIN Board 2007
• “If deployment <of IPv6> is delayed, the future growth and global connectivity of the Internet will be negatively impacted.” –Internet Society (ISOC) FAQ on IPv4/v6
• “.. in 2011, IPv6 must be in use by public-facing servers” –John Curran, ARIN Chairman, COO ServerVault  
•  “.. the Internet has been evolving, and IPv6 is the next major revolution that has to happen soon. ” –Vint Cerf, Internet Pioneer

John Curran, ARIN Chairman and COO of ServerVault, at a meeting of US Defense and Intel Internet engineers, went further to suggest that IPv6 transition is beyond an eBusiness continuity issue:

“<IPv6 transition> is a national economic policy issue and will be a national security policy issue within two years” 

As you can see in this picture, Google has been running their IPv6 service as a separate part of the Google space, and we connect across native IPv6 connections from the desktops in our Command Information network. (2610:F8::/32 is our address)  

However, more interesting than their IPv6-access site, is that they have installed an “invisible widget” on regular IPv4 Google to test IPv6 connectivity readiness of a portion of their users trying to connect to their production Google search portal. The widget directs a background process to exchange data with ipv4.ipv6-exp.l.google.com or dualstack.ipv6-exp.l.google.com to gather data on IPv6 connectivity. Lorenzo Colitti of Google revealed the experiment and the statistics they have been gathering at the European Internet Protocol Registry (RIPE) meeting at the end of October. Our enineers Joe Klein, TJ Evans, and others have analyzed their data and found a few interesting facts:

 
•  Less that 1% of Google users today have useful IPv6 connectivity (and prefer IPv6)
• 0.09% of IPv6 users have broken connectivity - most likely they don’t have both IPv6 connections and a AAAA capable DNS server serving IPv6 records. We can fix that with proper DNS implementations and IPv6 connection engineering
• All users with MS Vista, Apple Mac OSX Leopard, Windows Mobile smartphones, and modern Unix/Linux OSs have native IPv6-capable systems with IPv6 turned on - unless they have purposely disabled it. What’s holding them back is the lack of ‘last mile’ support infrastructure, and with IPv6 tunneling in these OS’s thats mostly a lack of IPv6 DNS implementation.
•  At least a million distinct IPv6 hosts out there have accessed Google during the test period
• The country with the most IPv6-ready users is Russia is the most IPv6-connected country -  the U.S. is #5 behind France, Ukraine, and Norway
• The most common connection type is 6to4 tunnels - which implies that sucessful IPv6 users are not behind NAT gateways and have native IPv4 connections that can run 6to4
• Apple has the most IPv6 connected computers - Joe commented that that’s probably the combination of Apple PCs with Apple Airport Extreme home network gateways - which support IPv6

 

 

 

The full report is available here: www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-56/presentations/Colitti-IPv6_at_Google.pdf

The takeaway from all of this? Google has taken the plunge and is well positioned for the 2012 number crunch pain by already having external IPv6 connectivity on their WWW and DNS servers. Organizations sucessfully running external IPv6 servers are the IETF, ARIN, RIPE, IPv6 Forum, ICANN, Command Information. and many more. It seems that the major IPv6 transition advocates are heeding their own advice and sucessfully “eating their own dogfood” to show that IPv6 transition is not as difficult as many believe.

In closing, here are a few interesting snapshots of the Google data:

 Original article was written by Mr. Dave Green of Command Information and can be found here http://www.commandinformation.com/blog/?p=85