Seconds count when it comes to warning people about an earthquake. Just a few moments can be the difference between being at risk in a dangerous area or making it to a safe shelter. NTT America developed an IPv6 Internet-based Earthquake Early Warning System that warns people in Japan of imminent earthquakes. Similar to the U.S. Emergency Alert System, it alerts people via fixed, mobile and wireless IPv6-enabled devices. It tells users what the scale of the earthquake will be and when it will strike.

One of the great promises of the new Internet protocol, IPv6, is the ability to assign IP address to just about anything. The protocol also makes it easier to quickly create ad hoc networks that could benefit an array of applications like NTT’s earthquake alert system. The promise of new and improved applications that take advantage of IPv6 led to the federal government’s adoption of the protocol.

An Office of Management and Budget mandate requires all government agencies to make their core networks IPv6-capable by June. There are no IPv6 mandates for civilian agencies after the deadline, but a number of systems integrators and network and application providers expect agencies to slowly start moving to the protocol once their networks can run it.

Opportunities remain to help agencies meet the June deadline, say information technology company officials. And the opportunities around IPv6 will continue to grow as new applications are developed.

DEADLINE PRESSURE
To comply with the deadline, agencies must show they can move IPv6 packets across their core networks.

“That is a pretty straightforward requirement,” said Walt Grabowski, vice president of marketing at SI International Inc. “So if I’m an agency right now, I’m looking to demonstrate something that is almost at the basis of IPv6.”

Several other IT company officials agreed with Grabowski that agencies are ready for the basic OMB mandate. “All of our customers are going to meet the deadline,” said Paul Girardi, director of engineering at AT&T Government Solutions. “They have different plans and objectives, but nonetheless, they’re ready to go.”

The top makers of core network devices, such as routers and switches, tend to be on the cutting edge of IPv6 technology, experts say. Integrators and agencies that have invested in IPv6 equipment should not worry about future requirements.

“If an agency has thought about the June deadline and they’ve done some upgrades or added equipment that provides basic IPv6 services, then they should be good to go,” Grabowski said.

AT&T is transitioning its customers to the new networks and setting up testing environments to help federal IT employees get comfortable with IPv6.

THE BUSINESS CASE
“We have a two-prong attack. We need to have and be able to offer an IPv6 service that makes up the core for these agencies,” Girardi said. “So the first thing we’ve been doing is rolling out an IPv6 service, the networking infrastructure back end that supports IPv6 packets.”

After establishing an IPv6-capable network, agencies will have to adhere to a profile being developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

“The profile is a much richer description of what IPv6 means and what a system that fully supports IPv6 should be capable of doing,” Grabowski said. “So the profile is looking further into the future. The profile is very important to the developers of systems and the manufacturers of systems as they make determinations regarding what should be in a piece of hardware or a piece of software.”

The Defense Department has its own basic IPv6 profile, which NIST is using as input for its profile. Industry officials want NIST to reconcile its profile with DOD’s.

“In general, agencies are going to get through the June 2008 deadline, and then it’s going to be a business-case decision that leads them to turning on IPv6 and eventually taking advantage of it,” said Alan Sekelsky, director of IP engineering at SI International.

Without deadlines, each agency will look at its business needs, refresh cycles and budgets to determine the extent to which it will enable IPv6. It is uncertain when applications enticing enough to lure government will be developed.

One of the biggest benefits of IPv6 is expected to be peer-to-peer capabilities that will make it easy for devices, sensors and other pieces of equipment to talk to one another.

“How near in the future [will that] be available? We just don’t know because until everybody else is on IPv6, it won’t be effective,” said William Clark, CA Inc.’s public sector chief technology officer. “If I do a peer-to-peer IPv6 application and 90 percent of the world can’t see me, then I don’t have a market necessarily for that application.”

NEXT STEPS
In the short term, systems integrators should focus on infrastructure management as agencies move to IPv6. Agencies will be forced to support today’s protocol, IPv4, and IPv6 for years via so-called dual-stack networks.

“Integrators will need to make sure that government departments and agencies running in a dual-stack environment aren’t tripping over protocols,” said Allan Sontra, CA’s public-sector technology specialist.

If, for example, a 10 megabit circuit is 90 percent full with IPv4 traffic, network administrators need to protect that. If a new IPv6 application tries to use 50 percent of the same network, there will be problems, he said. Most agencies don’t have a lot of operational experience with IPv6. Many are still doing lab work to ensure they understand how to manage that type of network. Services aimed at helping agencies run both protocols could be fruitful for contractors, said Tim LeMaster, director of systems engineering at Juniper Networks.

So agency operators and network engineers will have to troubleshoot, operate and maintain a dual stack for a number of years.

FOCUS ON SECURITY
The systems integrator community must also ensure that as IPv6 is deployed, it doesn’t introduce new security exposures. IPv6 makes it easy for every device to be visible on a network, but that is not always wise from a security perspective.

“That introduces some new and interesting security concerns,” Sontra said. “We have customers that want to make sure devices they don’t want the rest of the world to see are indeed hidden from view.”

The Defense Research and Engineering office is among the many DOD organizations that have invested heavily in IPv6. “They’ve done some analysis on how to manage a dual stack and the impact of that,” LeMaster said. “They haven’t found dual stack to be much more challenging than a single IPv4 network.”

Network backbones like Defense Research and Engineering’s will enable the services and applications IPv6 will offer. The next wave of work will be on those applications and services.

“It’s hard to create IPv6 applications if the infrastructure doesn’t support them, so this is laying the foundation,” LeMaster said. “A lot of applications will come into existence over the next five years for things we haven’t really thought yet.”

Doug Beizer (dbeizer@1105govinfo.com) is a staff writer at Washington Technology.