Courtesy of David Hughes, Silver Peak Systems Inc.

There are some perennial IT trends that crop up each year about this time, and in networking, IPv6 always seems to be in the mix.  Well, after many years, I think IPv6 is moving from a check-box item which “I’ll promise to do one day,” to being something where customers are now saying “you guys better be nearly finished because we want to start testing.”

2012 is going to be an interesting year from an IPv6 point-of-view. I think most enterprises are a long way from deploying IPv6, but a few are being forced down-the-path, in particular, in the “Web” vertical. If you look at the big Internet companies and service providers, it is those types of environments that require a lot of IP addresses, and perhaps even more in parts of the world outside the United States.  Those are the places where things are moving towards IPv6 more rapidly.

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