[AusNOG] IPv6 - What Should an Engineer Address when 'Selling' IPv6 to Executives?

[Mark Newton]

On Wed, Mar 06, 2013 at 10:11:23AM +1000, Paul Gear wrote:

 > IPv6 is a technical /must //do/,//and i continue to be wracked with 
 > professional guilt that i didn't start sooner, invest more learning 
 > time, and build up more practical experience with it, but i haven't 
 > managed to find a silver bullet for convincing management.  Some of the 
 > best Internet minds in the Asia-Pacific region are on this list.  If 
 > they can't come up with some good sells for the benefits of IPv6 now, 
 > what hope does the average IP professional have?

I think it's being overcomplicated to an extent.

It can be deployed incrementally.  As long as you've done some basic
architectural planning (e.g., plotting-out an addressing plan), you 
should be able to add IPv6 as a to-do item on each new deployment
project that comes down the pike.

Before you know it most of your network will be "naturally" upgraded
to dual stack just because you're upgrading and expanding anyway, and
you'll be almost at the point where you can start enabling it on 
user-facing and server-facing interfaces reasonably trivially.

The network is the easy bit.  If the members of this list had started
low-key activities back in 2011 when APNIC's last-/8 policy commenced,
they'd be done by now, the staff working on it would have received
ample on-the-job training about how it works, and the additional cost
they'd have incurred would have been pretty minimal.

I'm sure that treating IPv6 as if it's some kind of massive budget-
wrecking major project is part of the reason it hasn't been happening.
Well, it isn't one of those.  It's some planning, then it can go
through the rollout phase largely as business-as-usual.

  - mark