IPv6 Success Stories: Resiliency

At the ARIN 51 Public Policy and Members Meeting in April 2023, a panel of five community members who have contributed to the IPv6 case studies on our blog or have other IPv6 deployment experience joined us for a compelling and informative discussion moderated by ARIN President and CEO John Curran. In this IPv6 Success Stories series we’re highlighting the experiences, insights, lessons learned, and tips for successful IPv6 deployment shared by those panelists.

In the panel’s Q&A session, ARIN President and CEO John Curran asked the panelists questions to elicit more details about their deployment experiences for other organizations to consider when it comes to IPv6.

Has IPv6 made your network more resilient?

Ben Bittfield, an IPv6 contractor, recalled that rolling out dual stack definitely increased their resiliency because, as mentioned at another point in the panel by Matthew Wilder, Senior Engineer at TELUS Communications, having two networks effectively acts as multi-homing. Ben noted that this also helped win favor with executives for getting to a target state of IPv6-only.

Madhura Kale, Principal Product Manager Network & Compute at AWS, said that, from an AWS perspective, resiliency is pretty much the same. There may be an occasional outage that’s IPv4-only or IPv6-only, but overall she sees them equally performing.

Brent Mc Intosh, CTO of MCNET-SOLUTIONS, hasn’t seen much difference in resilience. He added that all services on the Internet exchange points he has deployed ran dual stack and, since most of the applications you access tend to prefer IPv6 first, there’s perceived improved performance when users can get locally cached content over IPv6 with no NATs involved in the event of an outage.

Brian Jones, Assistant Director of Operations at Virginia Tech, explained that some increased resiliency helped convince members of their service team about IPv6 — when IPv6 was working while IPv4 was down.

Matthew said it was an unexpected benefit to see the resiliency that comes from having the two address families put to use at the same time, creating the type of redundancy that everyone likes to see.

Learn more about IPv6 at arin.net/IPv6, and let us know about your own experiences, tips, tricks, and other thoughts on IPv6 deployment by commenting on this article or sending us a message.