router lifetime

Sun Oct 3 07:29:27 UTC 2010

From: "Brandon Kim" <brandon.kim at brandontek.com> 
To: franck at genius.com, nanog at nanog.org 
Sent: Saturday, 2 October, 2010 6:22:27 PM 
Subject: RE: router lifetime 

Well a lot of routers even 3 years ago support IPv6. You can dual-stack pretty much any router today if you have 
the right IOS. But I do understand your concern, if you want to future proof your purchase, I'd think any modern 
router today with a good support contract will take care of you for quite some time. 
Make sure it's not close to EOL. 

What kind of router are you considering? Is this for a large network? What are the network needs? 

Well it is not for me really. It is a kind of a survey. In your environment, how often do you replace your gear? 

I found out that switch gear from cisco with layer 3 routing, which are EOL today do not do IPv6 (at layer 3). Cisco Firewalls do not support well IPv6 unless you have upgraded this year, and for load balancers, you are out of luck. So basically anything which is EOL today has IPv6 issues while still much in use in production environment. Is that a fair assessment? I found out also that some gear with fancy IPv4 stuff do not do the same in IPv6, What about Juniper? 

Then there is the IPv6 is not done at hardware level, because software is fast enough for the current IPv6 bandwidth, but then if you expect to keep your gear for 8 years... Will you have to replace it much earlier than expected? 

It seems to me on the desktop/server, IPv6 is there free of charge (enabled by default), but on the network, switching to IPv6 is not free nor trivial. 