Database firm reports rising demand for IPv6

An article from www.networkworld.com.

Pervasive Software, a Texas maker of embeddable database software, says it is seeing a rise in demand for IPv6 support from its Japanese customers.

Pervasive plans to provide full IPv6 functionality in Release 11 of its PSQL software, which is due out this summer.
IPv6 is the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol, which is known as IPv4.

IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support 4.3 billion devices connected directly to the Internet. IPv6, on the other hand, uses 128-bit addresses and supports a virtually unlimited number of devices -- 2 to the 128th power.

The Internet infrastructure is migrating to IPv6 because it is running out of IPv4 address space. The Regional Internet Registries said in April that only 8% of IPv4 address remain unallocated. The remaining IPv4 addresses are expected to run out by 2012.

Pervasive says the demand for IPv6 is coming from the Japanese government market, which has new guidelines requiring agencies to purchase hardware and software systems that support IPv6.

"Most of our customers that sell to the central government or local governments as well have been trying wherever possible to use hardware and software that supports IPv6," says Martin Sims, Pervasive PSQL product manager. "I don't think many places have gone so far as using IPv6, but it is very much considered when people purchase hardware and software. Our Japanese customers have been very much asking us to come up with a version of our database product that supports IPv6."

Pervasive said that the Japanese government mandate for IPv6 has done more to encourage IPv6 deployment than similar efforts by Asian carriers.

"When the government comes out with these guidelines, vendors don't want that checkbox to be unchecked," Sims says. "One of our largest customers sells systems for libraries. Even though this is a central government guideline, it is filtering down to the local libraries."

The dynamic in the Japanese market is of interest because the U.S. federal government is instituting a similar change to its Federal Acquisition Regulation requiring all IT acquisitions to support IPv6. The FAR change goes into effect in July.

The U.S. government already met a mandate to demonstrate IPv6 capability on its backbone networks as of June 2008. But federal agencies have made little progress since then in terms of deploying IPv6.

Pervasive executives say they have not yet received requests for IPv6 support from its U.S. customers, many of whom are independent software vendors that support the U.S. federal market.

"The Westerners…keep asking us: Why are you doing this? Why are you investing money to add IPv6 into the product? Why can't you do this other preferred feature?" says Gilbert Van Cutsem, general manager of the database division at Pervasive Software. "But we have to do this because of the Japanese government mandating this. And a fairly big chunk of our revenues are coming out of Japan. But the good news is that while we're doing this for Japan, Japan is a little bit ahead of the curve for the rest of the world. The issue will hit all of us, but that might not be until 2012."

Pervasive says its PSQL software will have full IPv6 functionality for its legacy Btrieve interface this summer and that its SQL relational interface will support IPv6 by year-end.

Van Cutsem says Pervasive has been working on IPv6 development for six months.

"I wouldn't call it trivial," Van Cutsem says, pointing out that PSQL supports three operating systems. "The idea was that we always have a single code base for these three platforms so that all of these products are totally identical and totally compatible. Fixing IPv6 is one thing, but fixing it in such a way that you can deploy it on three platforms in exactly the same way with exactly the same behavior makes it non-trivial."

Pervasive says it is ready for the upcoming FAR change requiring IPv6.

"We wouldn't be afraid of the U.S. government's requirement," Van Cutsem says. "Thanks to our Japanese customers, we will not have to scramble to support it."

IPv6

Counting the days of IPv4

Who said that the world won't need 4,294,967,296 ip addresses? Well, this might be what they thought when they designed the first Internet Protocol which is commonly known as IPv4 (RFC 791). But today, the use of IPv4 address has grown exponentially which led to a rapid decrease of available ip address. JPNIC or Japan Network Information Center has released a statement about IPv4 consumption that the pool of IPv4 address is expected to run out this coming 2010
(http://www.apnic.net/news/2007/0626.html). It may not exactly fall on 2010 but truth about IPv4 address exhaustion is presistent and it will happen 2 to 4 years from now.

Why an exponential growth? Aside from the rapid growth of Internet users, you can find IPv4 address almost anywhere now. Your GPRS enabled mobile phone has an ip address and in some part of world even automobiles and home appliances can be connected and be monitored and controlled over the internet (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,110893,00.asp).

So what if the IPv4 reaches its end? There is no need to panic, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has already designed the Next Generation Internet Protocol 10 or 12 years ago. They call it Internet Protocol Version 6 or IPv6.

IPv6 to the rescue

This is the number of available IPv6 address the world can have 2^128. This is about 3x10^38 (340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456) ip addresses. Still it is a finite value though, but IPv6 architects said that this number should be enough for you to have your own PAN (Personal Area Network) in which even your underware is assigned with an IPv6 address.

How is this next generation address represented? If the IPv4 address which is 32-bit long was simplified by grouping it into octets(8-bits) separated with a dot(.) and represent each octet with its equivalent value in decimal, IPv6 address which is a 128-bit address is divided into 8 16-bit fields. The separator used in IPv6 is a colon(:) and represent each 16-bit number into a 4 digit hexadecimal value. A sample IPv6 address representation is 2001:0db8:abcd:00ef:0000:0000:0000:0001.

An IPv6 address has three categories just as we have IPv4 classes. The three categories are, IPv6 Unicast Address, IPv6 Multicast Address and IPv6 Anycast Address. An IPv6 unicast address can be used as an identifier for a single interface, an IPv6 anycast address can be used as an identifier for a set of interfaces, while an IPv6 multicast address can be used as an identifier for a group of nodes.

IPv6 Advantage over IPv4

Looking at the figures, we can directly identify that IPv6 offers a much larger IP address space than IPv4. With this, it is certain that IPv6 can be the solution of the IPv4 address depletion problem. The IPv6 address architecture is also more efficient and hierarchical than the IPv4 address. This will solve the currently increasing backbone routing table size. Lastly, IPv6 address was designed with some built-in features such as security, stateless address autoconfiguration, multicast, QoS (Quality of Service) and more.