IPv6 day has come and gone with barely a notice. In this case, no news is good news. Technology heavies with major Web presence like Facebook, Bing, Google, and others switched their platforms over from IPv4 to IPv6 for 24 hours. All of these participants are reporting their IPv6 testing results as a success:
Facebook: "World IPv6 Day came to an end earlier today. We successfully enabled IPv6 on our site for 24 hours, with great results. We saw over 1 million users reach us over IPv6. We're pleased that we did not see any increase in the number of users seeking help from our Help Center. The estimated 0.03% of users who may have been affected would have experienced slow page loads during the test.
"Based on the encouraging results, we've decided to leave our Developer site dual-stacked, supporting both IPv4 and IPv6. And we will continue to adapt our entire code base and tools to support IPv6."
Google: "The test flight was a success. World IPv6 Day is over, and IPv6 access to Google services remains enabled only for users in the Google over IPv6 program. We carried about 65% more IPv6 traffic than usual, saw no significant issues and did not have to disable IPv6 access for any networks or services. Over the next few weeks, we'll be working together with the other participants to analyze the data we've collected, but, at least on the surface, the first global test of IPv6 passed without incident."
Cisco Systems: "All in all, World IPv6 Day seems to have gone off without a hitch. IPv6 is the only long-term solution the industry has available to continue Internet growth in the manner that the world has come to expect. We believe that this day will be looked back upon as a watershed moment in the global deployment of IPv6—we have verified not only that IPv6 works on a global scale, but also that it can work alongside IPv4 until the day that we can all begin to turn IPv4 off."
These testimonies prove what many have speculated: the move from IPv4 to IPv6 will have little impact on accessing the sites most of us frequent every day. Nor will it have much effect on our home devices—Apple, Microsoft, and many of the Linux distributions have supported IPv6 for years. Most of the newer consumer devices like NASes and Wi-Fi routers also support IPv6 and it's not unreasonable to believe that manufacturers will push out firmware upgrades for IPv6 support for older devices.
No, the consensus is there should be few problems with consumer and end-user technology and access. The danger zone lies within the corporate network infrastructure. It's great if your client machines and the major websites are IPv6 ready, but that doesn't mean your internal network is. Enterprise firewalls, routers, Web applications, and other networked components must all support IPv6.
It's not an impossible task to get the business network IPv6-ready. There's a plethora of resources out there to point IT in the right direction. Cisco and the site gogoNET have excellent resources for IT on IPv6 preparedness.
The problem with many often-postponed IT tasks, as always, is valuable time and money. IPv6 has to be configured and tested before deploying to production environments. Newer networking equipment may have to be purchased. Many businesses are already IT-strapped with many shrinking or even cutting IT personnel and budgets. Yet, IPv6 will become the standard and businesses must take measures to get ready.
It's important for anyone responsible for a corporate network to realize, while World IPv6 Day is being hailed a success, there are still concerns that businesses may be in for a bumpy ride.