I am a lover of simple, efficient, and beautiful things. Ivan Peplnjak of ipSpace gets The Loosebolt’s Oscar Award for Elegance and Simplicity in a Complex Network Application. There may not be a little statue holding up a giant router or anything but his solution to IPv4 to IPv6 translation on the Internet is pretty compelling and allows the application developers and IT folks to “outsource” all concerns about this issue to the network.
At some point your Data Centers and network are going to have to tackle the interface between the commercial IPv4 Internet and the IPv6 Internet. If you are pretty aggressive on the IPv6 conversion in your data center, that pesky IPv4 Internet is going to prove to be a problem. Some think this can be handled by straight Network Address Translation, or having to dual home the servers in your data center on both networks. But this challenge has cascading challenges to your organization. Essentially it creates work for your System Admins, your developers, Web admins, etc. In short, you may have to figure out solutions at every level of the stack. I think Ivan’s approach makes it pretty simple and compelling if a bit of an unorthodox. His use of Stateless IP/ICMP Translation, which was originally intended a part of NAT64 and not on its own, solves an interesting problem and allows businesses to begin the conversion in a way that allows them to solve it one layer at a time and still allow those non-adopting IPv4 folks access to all the goodness within your data center.
His webcast on his approach can be found here.
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