IPv6 is the talk of the Internet, there are varying degrees of urgency stating that we will run out of existing IPv4 space within 2 years, with some saying there is enough IPv4 space left for 10 years. No matter which prediction is correct, eventually, IPv4 space will be exhausted and companies will have to begin migrating to IPv6 to ensure the availability of publicly routable IP space. Few companies have begun to evaluate the problem in detail; the sooner companies begin to evaluate their infrastructure, the more smoothly they can plan a migration from IPv4 to IPv6 and the longer period of time they can amortize the costs over.
IPv6 is an upgrade to the most basic elements of the internet and the networks that connect companies, individuals and the devices we have become so accustomed to using like our Blackberrys, iPhones and laptops. Making changes to the basis of all connectivity is not an easy thing to accomplish, or even begin planning for. The dependencies are unique and well established over many years of additions, improvements and research around IP connectivity. In this paper I intend to break down the process for companies to begin evaluating this upgrade to there infrastructure so that a strategic plan for IPv6 deployment can be developed.
Deployment Options
When deploying IPv6 there are a variety of options to ensure that no services will be interrupted during the time that both IPv4 and IPv6 are operational; both at your company, and across the global internet. Both options are important to consider because they each can work for specific cases to provide a bridge to IPv6 enable a system or application.
Parallel Stacks
When evaluating options for implementing IPv6 without impacting existing IPv4 traffic, most companies are looking to vendors to provide parallel stack capability, also called dual stack in some cases. By utilizing a parallel stack solution, companies can bring up IPv6 capability in parallel to their existing IPv4 deployments. This ensures that services can be migrated as they are fully tested and validated on IPv6. This parallel stack solution does come at a cost because of the overhead of administering two separate logical networks within a single physical network.
IPv6 NAT-PT
Todays modern routers are also offering capabilities to do NAT for traffic between IPv4 and IPv6, and vice-versa. IPv6 NAT-PT is a capability to have devices in your network with both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses assigned to them, these devices can then used as gateways for devices to use as a connection point to newer IPv6 devices. IPv6 NAT-PT was designed to provide a step from IPv4 to IPv6. IPv6 NAT-PT is a very specific use of the above mentioned parallel stack; ensuring that devices that only speak one protocol, can access devices speaking the alternate protocol.
Assessment
Overall Questions
The first step to evaluating the impact of an IPv6 update is by reviewing the high level components of your Information Technology (IT) systems. This evaluation is to begin looking at vendor commitments, capability and simplicity of system upgrades and regulatory impacts:
1)Inventory all vendors you currently use, document what there current and future support plans are for IPv6? What assistance can they provide either through documentation or consulting services to assist with a migration?
2)Review all applications, which ones are developed in house and which are commercial software? Are all the commercial software vendors still in business?
3)Do you have any legacy systems that no longer are covered by support agreements?
4)Do you have any systems that are covered by federal laws for data consistency? What legal rules are in place governing how these systems are tested and maintained?
Infrastructure Tiers
The next step is to systematically evaluate each component that contributes to the operational capability of your IT systems:
Network – Todays networks are complex sets of routers, switches, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and physical links between sites. To properly assess this portion for an IPv6 upgrade, an audit must be done for each device. It should assess what types of Deployment Options the device supports, how the vendor plans to support IPv6 on this platform and, what upgrades, either software or hardware will be required for IPv6 support.
VPN Infrastructure – Enterprises are increasingly reliant on VPNs to secure traffic in todays mobile workforce. The software and hardware supporting these VPN sessions needs to be tested and evaluated to ensure it will support future IPv6 connections and traffic as well as a mix of traffic during any transition periods.
Applications – Applications will be the most complex and time consuming component of the evaluation process. Most companies have many dozens of applications in place, if not more, that must be evaluated to ensure that they will properly migrate to IPv6. This assessment for each application will need to include outside dependencies like license servers, database servers or client software on users individual machines.
Monitoring Tools – Todays enterprises have a diverse collection of tools used for monitoring network usage, network performance, application usage, application availability, users connection. All this information is critical to both developing and ensuring compliance with SLAs. As part of a complete IPv6 assessment all monitoring tools, both performance and availably, should be evaluated to ensure they can provide the same level of detail in monitoring, as well as properly store and report data that could be IPv6 or IPv4 specific.
Core services – Core services, including DNS, DHCP, and file sharing are some of the most critical components to an IPv6 migration. These services form the basis for all user experiences and if implemented correctly, will ensure that a transition to IPv6 is seamless to the users.
Mobile Devices – Mobile devices are becoming a standard for doing business in todays mobile workforce. As you begin to develop your IPv6 transition plan, it is important to include these as part of the assessment to ensure they will continue to operate through the transition and when the transition is complete. You should begin by speaking with your mobile device vendors to understand if the carriers network will support your IPv6 plans, as well as your employees handheld devices. This assessment will allow you to develop a cost associated with upgrading or replacing units in the field.
End Users Systems – Todays mobile workforce means that many staff have a laptop and a desktop system at a minimum, with more then one laptop per person in a lot of cases. All these devices need to be evaluated for IPv6 support to see if they will support the proposed changes, and what, if any upgrades will be needed for full support. This will have an impact to both the schedule and cost of an IPv6 deployment.
Migration Timeline
Now that we have developed a list of what will need to be upgraded, and paired that with a list of what upgrades our vendors will support, we can use that to develop a process and timeline to test all necessary changes, upgrade appropriate systems and eventually move an an environment where IPv6 is fully operational across all IT systems. This planning stage, taking what we know will need to be updated and planning how to update and test it, is the most important part of an IPv6 migration. This stage is our best opportunity to ensure we understand the time commitments for this project, the costs this project will incur and the potential challenges we will run into.
As we develop a complete migration process, there are many angles that must be included to ensure all services rolled out are ready for prime time and allow your staff to be as proficient as they were in an all IPv4 world. We must ensure that we understand what software will need to be upgraded, what software re-written, and how to test those changes so that we do not introduce complications.
After we have a plan for making the appropriate software updates and testing them, you can develop a detailed plan for how to implement IPv6. This plan should include which services will be upgraded first, second and so on. This plan should also include what groups of users will be the first to migrate so that they can be made aware of the plans and provide input during the migration process. This input can then be used to make each subsequent step smoother then the previous one.
In addition to the migration plans and testing plans, plans for disaster recovery and maintenance will need to be updated. Because IPv6 is such a radical change from current technologies, most maintenance plans and disaster recovery plans will need to be updated to handle the varied techniques that will need to be used once IPv6 is in place and operational.
Industry Commitments
The last big question lingering after a through assessment of your infrastructure is, what about the rest of the industry and our vendors? That is currently a point of contention in the vendors space, vendors are hesitant to implement IPv6 capability until customers demand it, and customers are hesitant to implement IPv6 until vendors provide a fully support capability in there products. The most visible of this contention is with todays modern firewall products, today very few fully support the RFCs around IPv6, but as most companies look to IPv6, this is an early capability that must be in place to continue rolling out IPv6.
As time continues, more and more vendors will adopt and support IPv6 in the same ways they support IPv4. IPv4 has taken decades to grow to the point of adoption it is at now, along that path many, many enhancements have been made to the routers, switches and servers that power our enterprise environments. As time continues to progress, more and more customers will push vendors to add complete IPv6 capabilities, as they do it will enable a larger portion of companies to begin to fully embrace IPv6.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Hardware TCO – Predictable Planning with Refresh Cycles
Often, the most expensive investment any Information Technology (IT) organization will make is its base infrastructure; servers, storage and other various hardware. Yet, these hardware purchases are often given much less thought then software or services purchases and assumed to be routine, and just a cost of doing business. Hardware typically has several phases that should be evaluated as part of the purchase, these include the initial purchase price, the cost of maintaining it, and the ultimate cost of refreshing the hardware at the end of it's useful life. All should play an equal balance when evaluating new platforms, refresh cycles and testing new solutions for introduction to a company.
Often times when a company begins to assess the total cost of ownership (TCO) around its IT assets, it must involve teams not traditionally involved in IT planning. These teams can include facilities, engineering, building managers, application developers and data base administrators. Each of these groups can provide valuable input on how the servers and other infrastructure affect there environments and costs on a yearly basis.
There are three primary phases to all hardware purchases:
Initial Hardware Purchase
The initial hardware purchase is often thought to be the most expensive phase, but in reality after factoring in the support costs for a piece of hardware it turns out to be about one-third to one-fourth of the TCO. The initial price is often the easiest to evaluate, but should carefully be weighed against the long term costs of purchasing a specific brand or type of hardware.
Often vendors will allow for additional years of warranty coverage, or higher levels of support to be purchased when the system is first bought. These are often a wise investment if the hardware will be used longer then the initial warranty period. The increased level of support can often mean that your staff will spend less time supporting the system, and more time working on more beneficial tasks.
Support
The support costs are often the most expensive phases of hardware ownership. The support costs include patching the operating system, supplying power to the system, cooling the system and managing the applications hosted on the system. These costs are amortized over the life of the system, and over time can add up to be the most expensive part of the TCO formula. Often, these support costs are also where the most efficiencies can be gained to lower the TCO of the system.
There are many things that can be done to lower the support costs around hardware, most involve improved processes to cut back the amount of time staff have to spend manually managing each specific server. The most notable of these is automation of patch management. By utilizing tools to automate patch deployments and status monitoring, staff can cut significant manual administration time from each specific server. Proactive monitoring of system and application health can also play an important role in cutting down TCO for hardware and associated services. There are many packages available today to assist system administrators in proactively correcting both hardware and software faults before they cause a failure for the end users. These apps can ensure that staff isolate and correct problems as soon as possible to minimize the necessary time to correct faults.
Utilization is another space where the TCO for your servers can be lowered. By ensuring that servers do not run at idle for long periods of time, you can ensure that any power being used by the servers is being used efficiently. Often times, a single server can handle the load that multiple servers used to handle. It is much more efficient to power and cool a single server then multiple servers in this case, and scales very well as you begin looking at utilization rates across dozens or hundreds of servers.
Refresh
The final phase to evaluate for all hardware purchases is the refresh cycle. All hardware has a finite lifecycle in which at the end it will need to be replaced because it is either obsolete and not cost effective to maintain any longer. Obsolete in this context can be used in two ways, first to mean the hardware is so old is can no longer operate with the current operating systems, tools and patches available, or it no longer meets the business needs of your company.
There are often two methods that companies use to replace aging hardware, the first and most common is just purchasing new hardware when a system is no longer under warranty or has gotten too slow to use in the IT environment. More and more though, firms are implementing a rolling refresh cycle to add a level of predictability to all hardware purchases. A rolling refresh cycle allows a company to more clearly outlay capitol for IT investments, and better plan long term cycles for purchases, upgrades and replacements. Typically, a rolling refresh schedule is based on the standard warranty with newer server hardware, 3-5 years. A rolling refresh cycle also allows IT staff to better plan work loads by knowing ahead of time that new servers will need to be configured, tested and put into production.
Refresh cycle planning should also include an assessment of upcoming technologies and how that will affect purchases two and three years down the line. Every year hardware is faster and faster then before, and provides new possibilities for the amount of data that can be processed. In addition new technologies around virtualization are changing the dynamic of how system administrators provision new systems. No longer do system administrators add a single new server because of a single new application, today many different apps can be run on a single piece of hardware and kept separate from each other by using virtualization technologies.
As you assess your refresh cycle an important part of the TCO calculation is determining what applications can run within virtualized environments, and which will need separate hardware to run on. This will determine what level of consolidation can occur from year to year as the refresh occurs. As you look toward implementing a rolling refresh cycle, a first step is to understand how many existing servers are in place and how many existing applications. That data can then be used to develop a matrix of how things would look if virtualization were employed, and how a rolling refresh cycle could be utilized over time to ensure that all pieces of the infrastructure are upgraded in an expected period of time.
Minimizing the TCO of IT hardware is a key component of ensuring that the long term costs of owning the hardware are predictable and manageable. A rolling refresh cycle, paired with newer technologies like monitoring tools, automation tools and virtualization can allow IT staff to clearly plan how hardware will be used from purchase to end of life and how it will then be replaced. This cycle ensures staff can plan for future upgrades and migrations, as well as avoid last minute unexpected upgrades.
Often times when a company begins to assess the total cost of ownership (TCO) around its IT assets, it must involve teams not traditionally involved in IT planning. These teams can include facilities, engineering, building managers, application developers and data base administrators. Each of these groups can provide valuable input on how the servers and other infrastructure affect there environments and costs on a yearly basis.
There are three primary phases to all hardware purchases:
Initial Hardware Purchase
The initial hardware purchase is often thought to be the most expensive phase, but in reality after factoring in the support costs for a piece of hardware it turns out to be about one-third to one-fourth of the TCO. The initial price is often the easiest to evaluate, but should carefully be weighed against the long term costs of purchasing a specific brand or type of hardware.
Often vendors will allow for additional years of warranty coverage, or higher levels of support to be purchased when the system is first bought. These are often a wise investment if the hardware will be used longer then the initial warranty period. The increased level of support can often mean that your staff will spend less time supporting the system, and more time working on more beneficial tasks.
Support
The support costs are often the most expensive phases of hardware ownership. The support costs include patching the operating system, supplying power to the system, cooling the system and managing the applications hosted on the system. These costs are amortized over the life of the system, and over time can add up to be the most expensive part of the TCO formula. Often, these support costs are also where the most efficiencies can be gained to lower the TCO of the system.
There are many things that can be done to lower the support costs around hardware, most involve improved processes to cut back the amount of time staff have to spend manually managing each specific server. The most notable of these is automation of patch management. By utilizing tools to automate patch deployments and status monitoring, staff can cut significant manual administration time from each specific server. Proactive monitoring of system and application health can also play an important role in cutting down TCO for hardware and associated services. There are many packages available today to assist system administrators in proactively correcting both hardware and software faults before they cause a failure for the end users. These apps can ensure that staff isolate and correct problems as soon as possible to minimize the necessary time to correct faults.
Utilization is another space where the TCO for your servers can be lowered. By ensuring that servers do not run at idle for long periods of time, you can ensure that any power being used by the servers is being used efficiently. Often times, a single server can handle the load that multiple servers used to handle. It is much more efficient to power and cool a single server then multiple servers in this case, and scales very well as you begin looking at utilization rates across dozens or hundreds of servers.
Refresh
The final phase to evaluate for all hardware purchases is the refresh cycle. All hardware has a finite lifecycle in which at the end it will need to be replaced because it is either obsolete and not cost effective to maintain any longer. Obsolete in this context can be used in two ways, first to mean the hardware is so old is can no longer operate with the current operating systems, tools and patches available, or it no longer meets the business needs of your company.
There are often two methods that companies use to replace aging hardware, the first and most common is just purchasing new hardware when a system is no longer under warranty or has gotten too slow to use in the IT environment. More and more though, firms are implementing a rolling refresh cycle to add a level of predictability to all hardware purchases. A rolling refresh cycle allows a company to more clearly outlay capitol for IT investments, and better plan long term cycles for purchases, upgrades and replacements. Typically, a rolling refresh schedule is based on the standard warranty with newer server hardware, 3-5 years. A rolling refresh cycle also allows IT staff to better plan work loads by knowing ahead of time that new servers will need to be configured, tested and put into production.
Refresh cycle planning should also include an assessment of upcoming technologies and how that will affect purchases two and three years down the line. Every year hardware is faster and faster then before, and provides new possibilities for the amount of data that can be processed. In addition new technologies around virtualization are changing the dynamic of how system administrators provision new systems. No longer do system administrators add a single new server because of a single new application, today many different apps can be run on a single piece of hardware and kept separate from each other by using virtualization technologies.
As you assess your refresh cycle an important part of the TCO calculation is determining what applications can run within virtualized environments, and which will need separate hardware to run on. This will determine what level of consolidation can occur from year to year as the refresh occurs. As you look toward implementing a rolling refresh cycle, a first step is to understand how many existing servers are in place and how many existing applications. That data can then be used to develop a matrix of how things would look if virtualization were employed, and how a rolling refresh cycle could be utilized over time to ensure that all pieces of the infrastructure are upgraded in an expected period of time.
Minimizing the TCO of IT hardware is a key component of ensuring that the long term costs of owning the hardware are predictable and manageable. A rolling refresh cycle, paired with newer technologies like monitoring tools, automation tools and virtualization can allow IT staff to clearly plan how hardware will be used from purchase to end of life and how it will then be replaced. This cycle ensures staff can plan for future upgrades and migrations, as well as avoid last minute unexpected upgrades.
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