 Optical NetworkingThis newsletter is sponsored by ShoreTelNetwork World's Optical Networking Newsletter, 06/18/07Where eight network management vendors stand on IPv6By Carolyn Duffy MarsanWith the June 2008 deadline for federal agencies to support IPv6 only a year away, network management vendors are starting to upgrade their products to support the emerging protocol. IPv6 is a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet’s primary protocol, IPv4. It has a 128-bit addressing scheme that lets it support an order-of-magnitude more devices connected directly to the Internet, than IPv4’s 32-bit addressing scheme can. It also has autoconfiguration, end-to-end security and other enhancements. We contacted several leading network-management vendors, and here’s what they had to say about their IPv6 development efforts.
Cisco has supported IPv6 in its IOS software since 2001. During the last two years, Cisco has begun developing IPv6 support in other management tools that its customers will need to move their network architectures to IPv6. Cisco offers a free auditing tool called IPv6 Network Assessor that automates the process of figuring out which Cisco switches and routers on a network are ready for IPv6 and which aren’t. Cisco also hs upgraded its CiscoWorks campus-management software to manage its IPv6-enabled Layer 2 and Layer 3 devices. The software offers limited support for IPv6: identifying address identification, management of some configurations and limited path tracing. However, CiscoWorks doesn’t offer the full set of features available in IPv4. Cisco Network Registrar (CNR), a DNS and DHCP package, supports IPv6, including stateful and stateless configuration. Cable service providers are among the early adopters of IPv6-enabled Cisco Network Registrar. Cisco also has an IPv6-enabled Network Analysis Module, which is a blade that sits in its switches and reports back to Cisco's NetFlow traffic monitoring software. "Over the next several years, you will see us really begin to strengthen our management product portfolio across the board just like we’re doing within our hardware platforms because we see it as a fundamental component of any IPv6 transition," says Dave West, director of field operations at Cisco’s Federal Center of Excellence. West says one of the first things that network managers need for the transition to IPv6 is DNS and DHCP tools. That’s because IPv6 addresses are so long that network managers won’t be able to remember them and accurately type them into network management applications. Instead, network managers will use IPv6-enabled DNS and DHCP software for those tasks. "The way we have taken advantage of stateless and stateful autoconfiguration in CNR is an example of us understanding the capabilities of IPv6 and providing those capabilities to our customers through DHCP v6 services," he says. West says federal network managers will find enough IPv6-enabled network management tools for the initial deployments required by the Office of Management and Budget mandate. Those tools, however, are nowhere near parity between IPv6 and IPv4 capabilities. "The management products will mature as more devices support IPv6," he says. 2. Network InstrumentsNetworks Instruments offers full IPv6 support in Version 12 of its Observer family of network analysis and monitoring products. The new version, released in March, supports native IPv6, dual-stack IPv4 and IPv6 environments, and tunneling. "We’ve had native IPv6 filtering and decoding for three or four years," says Charles Thompson, the company's manager of sales engineering. "But with the release of Observer 12 in March, we’ve implemented support for IPv6 across our entire application. We’ve added IPv6 support for VoIP, for all of our expert-analysis functionality and all of our statistics." Thompson says all the functionality available for IPv4 is now available for IPv6. Next up for Network Instruments is adding features specific to IPv6. "Once people start implementing additional features, it’s going to change the way we analyze the data,’’ he says. "We're going to have to look more at the transport of the data than the data itself because IPSec will force us to do that." Thompson says customers were asking Network Instruments for IPv6 support. "The government space has some interest but also carriers and service providers that are going to be transporting IPv6," he says. To read what EMC, Network General, IBM Tivoli, Netcordia, Apparent Networks and Network Physics had to say, please click here.
|
| Contact the author: Carolyn Duffy Marsan is a senior editor with Network World and covers emerging Internet technologies and standards. Reach her at cmarsan@nww.com This newsletter is sponsored by ShoreTelARCHIVEArchive of the Optical Networking Newsletter. BONUS FEATUREIT PRODUCT RESEARCH AT YOUR FINGERTIPS Get detailed information on thousands of products, conduct side-by-side comparisons and read product test and review results with Network World’s IT Buyer’s Guides. Find the best solution faster than ever with over 100 distinct categories across the security, storage, management, wireless, infrastructure and convergence markets. Click here for details. PRINT SUBSCRIPTIONS AVAILABLE International subscribers, click here. SUBSCRIPTION SERVICESTo subscribe or unsubscribe to any Network World newsletter, change your e-mail address or contact us, click here. This message was sent to: networking.world@gmail.com. Please use this address when modifying your subscription. Advertising information: Write to Associate Publisher Online Susan Cardoza Network World, Inc., 118 Turnpike Road, Southborough, MA 01772 Copyright Network World, Inc., 2007 |
No comments:
Post a Comment