Hurricane Electric has announced that it is extending its IPv6 Professional Services offerings to include data center deployments, and is recommending a swift transition to avoid unnecessary costs and gain a competitive advantage.

With a successful World IPv6 Day on June 8th and the prediction that the American Registry of Internet Numbers (ARIN) will allocate its last IPv4 addresses this before the end of this year, Hurricane Electric is suggesting simple steps for data center managers to ease the transition and reap the benefits inherent in IPv6.

Owen Delong, IPv6 evangelist at Hurricane Electric 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. “For those data center managers looking for some guidance and assistance, Hurricane Electric’s professional services division is available to assist.”

Despite the effort required to transition to IPv6, IPv6 has tremendous long-term benefits. According to a US Commerce Department study, ongoing benefits to the global economy of $10 billion/year will result from IPv6 adoption.

Recently, Owen Delong, conducted the first IPv6 certification course in Mexico and was appointed to the IPv6 Advisory Board for Infoblox, a leading developer of network infrastructure automation and control solutions. In addition, this month Owen taught an IPv6 seminar to secondary and post secondary school communities in Lincoln, NE.