Hurricane Electric, arguably the world's largest IPv6-native Internet backbone and co-location provider, has expanded its IPv6 Professional Services offerings so that they can now help you with IPv6 datacenter deployments.

If you're a home user or just have a small office/home office (SOHO), you don't need to worry about the fact that we're running out of IPv4 addresses anytime soon. It's a different story though if you're managing a datacenter. In a datacenter, you can need hundreds or thousands of new Internet addresses on any given day. Since the American Registry of Internet Numbers (ARIN) expects to allocate its last IPv4 addresses before year's end, datacenter managers must start converting over to IPv6.

According to Owen Delong, Hurricane Electric's IPv6 evangelist and director of professional services, recommends transitioning to a dual-stack environment by implementing the following steps:

" Add IPv6 Capabilities to provisioning and monitoring systems " Upgrade critical infrastructure (hardware and software) to support dual IPv4/IPv6 stacks " Plan data center addressing and deployment " Enable IPv6 on your core and backbone " Establish IPv6 peering and transit sessions " Add IPv6 capabilities to external facing services, including email, Web and DNS

"From improved network topologies to built-in IPSec, IPv6 can bring immediate benefits to the data center. By investing in good staff training, the average data center operator should have few problems deploying IPv6 and avoid costs later on down the road," said Owen Delong in a statement. "For those data center managers looking for some guidance and assistance, Hurricane Electric's professional services division is available to assist."

Since Hurricane Electric has been doing IPv6 starting in 2001, I'm inclined to trust them. If I had to bring over a datacenter to IPv6 and I didn't have the in-house expertise I'd go to them. Frankly, even if I did have a covey of Cisco Certified Internetwork Experts (CCIE) at my beck and call, I'd still call in Hurricane. Shifting over a datacenter to any new technology demands all the expert help you can get, and when it comes to IPv6, that means Hurricane Electric.

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