In today’s evolving business climate, US government policies are driving more discussion and increasing adoption of IPv6. IPv6 alleviates the IPv4 exhaustion crisis for the conceivable future. Other IPv6 enhancements include improvements in efficiency, performance, and security. Find out how HPE GreenLake for Block Storage – powered by HPE Alletra Storage MP – is ready, willing, and able to work in your IPv6-only environment, making sure your storage solutions are compliant with federal requirements and ready for the future.
– By Dan Gardner, Senior Technical Marketing Engineer
Built on the new HPE Alletra Storage MP hardware, and managed via the HPE GreenLake cloud platform, this unique block storage offering brings the cloud experience, efficient scale, and extreme resiliency and performance to mission-critical apps – at an affordable mid-range price point.
HPE is delighted to announce that HPE GreenLake for Block Storage powered by HPE Alletra Storage MP release version 10.2.0 has received the IPv6 Ready Phase 2 (Gold) Core Logo for Host accreditation and is listed in the registry of USGv6 approved products. With these accreditations, HPE GreenLake for Block Storage joins HPE Primera and HPE Alletra 9000 to provide a fully USGv6-approved Tier 0 block storage portfolio.
What is IPv6 – and why is it so important?
The fact is – IPv6 is nothing new.
Around 25 years ago, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) developed the draft standard to address the impending shortage of IPv4 addresses. Unfortunately, the uptake has been slow, and as of November 2023 Google reported that global IPv6 adoption rate was only around 40% (around 49% in the U.S.).
This happened, in part, due to the widespread use of network address translation (NAT). which takes private, internal IPv4 addresses and translates them to a public IPv4 address that can be used to communicate across the internet. With NAT, a single public IPv4 address can be used to represent many privately addressed network nodes.
IPv6 uses 128-bit addressing rather than the 32-bit addressing of IPv4 which theoretically allows for 2^138 (or around 340 undecillion) addresses rather than the 234 (~4.7 billion) addresses of IPv4. The actual number of available IPv6 addresses is lower due to certain ranges being reserved for special use, but that’s still an almost unfathomable number of extra addresses and means that NAT is no longer required.
It’s not just about extra addresses.
It’s not just a bigger address space! IPv6 has a number of enhancements compared with IPv4. For example, IPv6 reduces the size of routing tables through prefix aggregation, makes packet processing more efficient with a simplified packet header, and can save network bandwidth by using multicast rather than broadcast – all of which can greatly improve performance. Security is at the core of IPv6, as well. Rather than being bolted on like in IPv4, IPSec is baked-in to provide confidentiality, authentication, and data integrity for network traffic, guarding against eavesdropping and packet manipulation rather than relying on application-dependent security features.
Why are we talking about IPV6 now?
In November of 2020 the U.S. Government Office of Management and Budget issued OMB Memorandum M-21-07 which requires all federal agencies to move from IPv4 to IPv6. The Department of Defense issued a memorandum in June 2021 stating, “all new networked DoD information systems that use (IP) technologies will be IPv6-enabled before implementation and operational use by the end of 2023”. The memorandum provides a staged implementation plan to reach full IPv6 use by the end of 2025, with incremental milestones of 20%, 50% and 80% of IP-enabled assets on Federal networks operating in a IPv6-only configuration by the end of fiscal years 2023, 2024, and 2025.
USGv6 and IPv6 Ready
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was tasked with developing the standards and testing necessary to enable the roll out of IPv6 across the U.S. Government. This standard, known as USGv6, is designed to ensure that all USGv6-approved products can be safely deployed in IPv6 environments and conform to the IETF specifications. USGv6 Revision 1 (USGv6-r1), published by NIST in 2020, added several new testing suites to the USGv6 profile including testing in IPv6-only environments to ensure that there is no reliance on IPv4, or any loss of function without it.
The IPv6 Ready program is a conformance and interoperability testing program developed by the IPv6 Forum, an international consortium with a key focus of providing technical guidance for the deployment of IPv6. Both testing programs have similar testing requirements, details of which can be found here for IPv6 Ready and here for USGv6.
With this validation you can be confident that HPE GreenLake for Block Storage powered by HPE Alletra Storage MP is tried and tested in IPv6-only environments – giving you one less thing to be concerned about when making the switch from IPv4 to IPv6.
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Meet Dan Gardner, Senior Technical Marketing Engineer
As a member of the Storage Technical Marketing team, Dan focuses on all things security – from platform, to network, to cloud, and everything in between. Bringing security to the forefront of the conversation enables customers to keep their data secure, whether it’s at rest or in flight.
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