What Should an Engineer Address when 'Selling' IPv6 to Executives?

Tue Mar 12 09:45:10 UTC 2013

I would be concerned in strongly spruiking advantages of IPv6 to
executives if an IPv6 dual stack solution is actually being deployed.
(ie. some given IPv6 SS advantages below do not apply to IPv6 DS)

> 	1.	Decreased application complexity:
> 			Because we will be able to get rid of all that NAT traversal code,
> 			we get the following benefits:
>
> 			I.	Improved security
> 				A.	Fewer code paths to test
> 				B.	Lower complexity = less opportunity to introduce flaws
> 			II.	Lower cost
> 				A.	Less developer man hours maintaining (or developing) NAT  
> traversal code
> 				B.	Less QA time spent testing NAT traversal code
> 				C.	No longer need to keep the lab stocked with every NAT  
> implementation ever invented
> 				D.	Fewer calls to support for failures in product's NAT traversal  
> code
> 	2.	Increased transparency:
> 			Because addressing is now end-to-end transparent, we gain a
> 			number of benefits:
>
> 			I.	Improved Security
> 				A.	Harder for attackers to hide in anonymous address space.
> 				B.	Easier to track down spoofing
> 				C.	Simplified log correlation
> 				D.	Easier to identify source/target of attacks
> 			II.	Simplified troubleshooting
> 				A.	No more need to include state table dumps in troubleshooting
> 				B.	tcpdump inside and tcpdump outside contain the same packets.
>

There are two well documented advantages to IPv6 dual stack:

- responding to customers requesting IPv6 dual stack connectivity
- excellent access to the IPv4 network

IPv6 is a *different* network to IPv4 even if both networks happen to be
carried on the same platforms (thank you Cisco, F5, Juniper etc -
without this, our execs would be seriously baulking at having to replace  
fairly
modern hardware).

I have also noticed examples given of historic protocol changes. Not all of
these are relevant as some of them only involved "middle" OSI layers, so
do not apply very well to the IPv6->IPv6 transition.

Greets
Engineer Karl Pospisek (alias kpospisek at telstra.com)