October 13, 2009
Cisco Broadens IPv6 SolutionsBy Paula Bernier, Executive Editor, IP Communications Magazines Cisco Systems (News - Alert) today announced that IPv6 capabilities have been added to a wide range of its routers and switches, including the CRS-1 Carrier Routing System for the network core and to the Cisco Aggregation Services Routers for the network edge.
Support for IPv6 is important given industry experts expect the supply of IPv4 addresses, of which there are about 4 billion, to be exhausted sometime in 2011. On the up side, there are 340 undecillion unique addresses (3.4 x 1038), or more than 50 billion billion billion for each person on earth, according to Cisco.
On the down side, IPv4 and IPv6 are not compatible with one another, so the move to IPv6 requires careful planning. Cisco says its capabilities such as dual stack, IPv4-over-IPv6, and IPv6-over-IPv4 tunneling technologies work in conjunction with LSN capabilities to facilitate the migration to an all-IPv6 network.
“IPv4 address exhaustion will cause huge problems for China Internet's growth, so we must make the IPv6 transition happen smoothly,” said Xing Li, deputy director of CERNET Center in China. “For that, CERNET has been leading several new technology proposals in IETF. We are very pleased to see the Cisco IPv6 architectural approach to support the emerging tunneling and translation technologies.” Edited by Michael Dinan (source: http://hosted-voip.tmcnet.com/feature/articles/66451-cisco-broadens-ipv6-solutions.htm) |