The Road to IPv6 Is Longer Than Expected

Mike Fratto

Summary Bullets:

• IPv6 migration worldwide is dragging along at a glacial pace.  Yet, it is no wonder enterprises are not planning on migrations anytime soon.
• Enterprises will be deploying IPv6 transition strategies long before they will be migrating their internal networks to IPv6.

Whither IPv6?  When the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated the last IPv4 address block in January 2011, the prognosis did not look good for IPv4.  Shortly thereafter, some of the regional Internet authorities stopped allocating IPv4 blocks downstream, reserving a small portion for IPv4-to-IPv6 transition strategies.  Here in the U.S., Comcast and Time Warner started rolling out IPv6 to business and residential customers while Verizon Wireless began using IPv6 on its 3G/4G networks.

Undervaluing Disaster Recovery in Data Center Services

Michal Halama

Summary Bullets

• Treating business continuity and disaster recovery services as ‘must-haves’ can obscure value and cost
• Cloud-based business continuity and disaster recovery services can adjust to variable values over time

The best businesses (buyers and service providers) develop effective business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategies well in advance of natural and man-made catastrophes. AT&T’s investment and development of physical solutions to help customers recover from major outages is a good example. Some other organizations become focused later, and may survive (through good fortune). This can result in BCDR services later being assumed and treated as ‘must-haves’. They may then be bundled with underlying services, which can obscure the true value and cost of BCDR to service provider and customer alike. BCDR teams: does your organization value your service highly enough, or do colleagues see ‘must-have’ BCDR as a cost weighing on underlying service?