On 7 May 2020, at 11:32, Aled Morris 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

On Thu, 7 May 2020 at 11:19, Paul Bone 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
The example of Universities with a /16 that have not implemented IPv6 because 
they have not needed to is just one example of the scale of the problem.


I'm interested to know which Universities have not implemented IPv6

There’s only a dozen or so universities that have any form of significant IPv6 
deployment.  Imperial College are the “flagship” deployment; they are 100G 
connected to Janet and commonly ship several 10’s of Gbit/s of IPv6 data 
transfers, particularly from CERN.  Their new compute cluster and research file 
store is IPv6-only, internally.

I doubt there's a correlation between owning legacy IPv4 space and not 
implementing IPv6.  The organisations I've dealt with who have no interest in 
IPv6 also have very little IPv4 address space and use RFC1918 extensively 
internally.  The problem seems to be that networking is rarely their core 
function - they are in some other industry and the amount of expertise they 
have for networking is spread thin, which limits their ability to embrace 
change.  Their engineers don't attend UKNOF, they aren't in our sphere of 
influence, they barely realise IPv6 is a thing - to them it's some research 
project that someone mentioned once.  Until their customers demand it, they 
won't react.  They might as well engrave "If it aint broke, don't fix it" on 
their computer room door.

Well, universities and colleges will teach networking; there’s at least an 
argument there that IPv6 is desirable to support teaching as well as research.  
I’d consider it odd to have (say) computer science graduates that have not been 
exposed to Ipv6 on campus during their studies, or maybe that’s part of the 
problem?

One of the drivers for IPv6 adoption at universities is the CERN experiments; 
there’s about 20 universities who are deploying or have deployed IPv6 in 
support of that, given the community (WLCG) mandated IPv6.  Around 80% of the 
storage is now IPv6-enabled, I believe.  There was a talk about this at UKNOF 
not long ago.  They’re now looking at where IPv4 can be turned off, and when.

Tim

Reply via email to