The IPv6 Transition Programme is a national effort spearheaded by IDA to address the issue of IPv4 exhaustion and to facilitate the smooth transition of the Singapore Infocomm ecosystem to IPv6. The programme also promotes readiness and adoption of IPv6 in the local industry through a series of projects.
This series of articles highlights local companies which have made the transition to IPv6 as part of the programme.
Moving its main corporate site is the first of many IPv6 migrations for the SingTel group. The experience migrating their main corporate site SingTel.com is the first of many and now serves as a prototype for some 50 other SingTel sites which will be IPv6 ready eventually. They include food portal
HungryGoWhere.com
, lifestyle and news portal
inSing.com
and online store,
SingTelshop.com
.
SingTel's 4-man team began its migration work in the third quarter of 2011. The purchase of new hardware was part of a regular hardware refresh that takes place every 4 to 10 years. To make the most of this round of upgrades, SingTel made sure that they chose hardware that was IPv6 compliant-a more sustainable choice in light of the
global depletion of IPv4 addresses
.
The greatest expenditure for them was not the hardware purchase; instead, it was the man-hours spent updating and educating the team about the new technology, shared Valerie Hong, a Senior Manager overseeing data network in information systems infrastructure.
For Valerie, picking up new knowledge was an exciting experience. To prepare for the migration, her team attended courses and took part in redesigning an internet-facing network to support IPv6.
But the biggest challenge, she shared, was to make sure that everyone else in the Information Systems team also understood IPv6 and its impact on their area of work, be it the network, firewall or internet-facing layers. Each layer, from back to front-end, had to "speak the same language" eventually.
Regular information sharing sessions with colleagues both in and out of the infrastructure team were key to the transition.
Besides improving their proficiency with the technology, everyone also had a chance to refresh their understanding of the business requirements, relating them back to their technical work.
The SingTel.com website was officially IPv6-ready in June 2012. The upgrade made no difference to most users, mainly from consumers and enterprises from Singapore, as IPv4 traffic continues to be supported. This was achieved with a "dual-stack" approach, which runs both IPv4 and IPv6 on the same network infrastructure.
So far, less than 1% of visitors to their website use IPv6 addresses. However, this does not mean there is no urgency to migrate their other sites.
Valerie and her team will be duplicating and refining the migration process as the SingTel group proceeds to migrate its other sites. She believes that the experience will get smoother as her team, as well as the vendors engaged, is more familiar with the technology.
Looking forward, Valerie hopes that there will be more than one test environment for IPv6 implementations. Currently, test environments are limited and testing cannot be done in a live environment. This was one constraint that they faced.
"There is only one staging environment for all of us and IPv6 is not available in the live environment so we hope there can be more so we can do more tests," she shared.
The transition to IPv6 is a global development that no company can ignore. Take a leaf from pioneering companies like SingTel and begin by understanding the concept of IPv6 and the possibilities it offers.
Ultimately, SingTel's decision to begin migration early not only offers them ample time to experiment, learn and adjust their operations, but also creates opportunities for external vendors to explore this relatively new technology as soon as possible.
For companies who are still on the fence about the transition, Valerie encourages fellow infocomm professionals to begin learning and experimentation.
"After all, the IPv6 license comes with the hardware. Switching to IPv6 is just like any other hardware refresh, except that there is additional manpower training cost," said Valerie.
"Start by setting up a test environment so you can go hands-on to understand the details. Then, you can make recommendations to your management and demonstrate how IPv6 impacts operations as a whole."