Friday, February 13, 2009

Why IPv6 hosting is a cool idea

Say you're company "X" and you host a product or service of some kind that requires downloads on occasion (automated, user-initiated, whatever; drivers, patches, RPMs, whathaveyou). Everyone goes to your hosted website for the downloads and that ends up costing money (for all that bandwidth) or aggravation for the end user because of slow patches, etc.

You could have both an IPv4 and a IPv6 website on totally separate networks, one the "expensive business bandwidth" IPv6 and the cheap bandwidth (still with speedy up and downloads) on the IPv6 side. You could synch the two together in any way you see fit.

Company X would most likely use the IPv4 website as the primary though I'd suggest drinking the 128 bit kool-aid, installing 6to4 on the firewall, jumping in and joining the party. But that's me, not you, and your mileage my vary. Irregardless for any installed system needing patches that is on a forward-thinking IPv6 network it may know it's time for patching and look up the hostname of the patch server and commense to communicating with said server.

Since you've got both an IPv4 and IPv6 address configured in your DNS the server will go to IPv6 if they can and fall back to IPv4 if they can't. The IPv4 single stack machine will ignore the IPv6 response and go to the IPv4 patch machine.

You could say "unnecessary" and today it could be argued that you're right. But I'd also argue now is the time for action. Get ahead of the curve. IPv6 hosting and connectivity is dirt cheap if you know where to find it and thanks to DNS and dual stacks updateserver.companyx.com can point to totally different networks at opposite ends of the globe and the user (or the application) is none the wiser.

Of course you don't have to go the hosting route. You could get a nice, fat block of IPv6 addresses from your LIR and you'd be off to the races running a combined v4/v6 hosting enviornment yourself. But that's not fun, is it? :)

1 comment:

Paul said...

Hosting something on IPv6 isn't necessarily going to be any cheaper than on IPv4. If you use 6to4 or a tunnel broker, you'll have to send the same amount of IPv4 traffic to the tunnel, plus some overhead.

If you get native IPv6 from your ISP or hosting provider, then, well, I doubt their billing department is going to care how your IP headers are formatted.

As for load balancing, that issue is completely orthogonal to IPv6. For example, companies like Akamai can provide hostnames that resolve to localized IPv4 addresses from all around the world.

By a vast margin, the killer feature of IPv6 is the larger address space. Everything else is peanuts.