U.S. federal agencies ready for IPv6 D-Day (which is today)
federal agency has asked for an extension beyond 30 June. “It’s a huge accomplishment for all of us to make the deadline,” Evans says. “Agencies had to buy IPv6-compliant hardware, put the services out there and properly implement them so that they can run IPv6 across their backbones.”
Even more important to the Bush administration is the fact that the U.S. federal government met its IPv6 deadline without a huge influx of cash. When the federal IPv6 mandate was being considered, some IPv6 marketers said the U.S. federal government needed to spend upwards of $10 billion on IPv6 transition. OMB proved them wrong. Instead, the U.S. government is migrating to IPv6 through its regular tech refresh budget with some minor additional spending in training and network engineering. “We’re going through this transition based on the life cycle of our IT investments,” Evans says. “The infrastructure that agencies were buying already have IPv6 capabilities…. If we had done this as an after-thought, then it would have been a huge cost….We’re transitioning to IPv6 in a very concerted way.”
Meeting the OMB’s IPv6 mandate is relatively easy. Agencies have to prove they can pass IPv6 packets across their backbone networks, and this is possible because most routers support IPv6. There is no requirement for agencies to run IPv6 in production mode on their networks, however, or to port their applications to IPv6. The Bush administration has no plans to establish additional IPv6-related deadlines. That will be up to the next person who directs OMB’s e-government and IT initiatives, Evans says. In the meantime, OMB will continue to require agencies to discuss IPv6 progress in their annual reports on enterprise architecture. “Right now, we have agencies focused on segment network architectures that are robust…This information is going to be available so the next person in my position could take advantage of what we’ve done and make multiple deadlines for other IPv6-related capabilities,” Evans said.
Some industry observers say OMB did not go far enough with its IPv6 mandate, which didn’t include deadlines for production-level deployment of the protocol. “I think the real issue is that we don’t have a lot of agencies running dual IPv4/IPv6 stacks. We don’t have a lot of people adopting IPv6,” says Diana Gowen, senior vice president and general manager of Qwest Government Services, which helped the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Maritime Commission meet the IPv6 deadline. “The
