BANGALORE, INDIA: “In the early period of Internet, we were able to translate from one protocol to another (known as Flag Day), because Internet was a small enough to co-ordinate. However, today it is very distributed in nature. Many governmental and political entities are using it and so there is no way to have a uniform Flag Day, so we need to have other technologies to make this transition happen,” says Truman Boyes, leader of the network architects that comprise Juniper’s Asia Pacific professional services consultancy team.

He was speaking to Deepa Damodaran of CIOL during an interview, recently. Excerpts:

CIOL: Which are the technologies that allow this transition to IPv6?

Truman Boyes: There are several technologies that allow this transition. One such mechanism is Large Scale NAT (LSN), which is also known as Carrier Grade NAT.

It can scale massively to translate one protocol to another and will allow service providers to deploy IPv4, and IPv6 services and thus communicate with clients or other organisation, which are using one or the other protocol.

CIOL: However, reports say that even if you are able to translate to IPv6 with LSN, the network is incapable to scale and support so many users and thus slows down?

Truman: The problem with LSN is that it eventually becomes a part of the NAC in network. So while selecting the the scale of a product, a company should apply a lot of diligence and select the right product.

The type of scale that we are talking about is close to 100 million sessions through a single box.

So if something happens to that particular box or device on the network, then it will have a huge effect on millions of computers at one point of time. So a lot of rigour has to be put into in the types of products that fill the role.

When you are doing translation of protocol, some application do not respond well with the process.

There is less and less of these kind of applications because almost everyone has a router at their home, which is capable of performing NAT (Network Address Translation), although at a smaller scale. So most applications that we use today work well with NAT.

However, there are a few business applications that do not, and if such products are there in the middle of the network, which is being used for translation, it will create issues for this application.

CIOL: So what should be done to applications so that transition to next generation protocol is smooth in the future? Why do companies hesitate to move on to IPv6?

Truman: In case of Carrier Grade NAT, one thing that needs to be changed is the way in which application designers write software.

All application designers need to move away from embedding addresses into application or code because when we are translating a particular part of the Internet packet from IPv4 to IPv6, or the other way round, and if there is something that can not be translated and if it is sitting in the middle of the packet, then the application will not to work properly.

Moreover, in terms of adoption of IPv6 there is a complete lack of strategy. It is more of an organisation issue, than a technical one. A lot of organisations do not have an understanding of how they are going to move to IPv6.