Web hosting service provider sees demand for new protocol picking up
Mr Alan Woo, Co-founder and CTO, NewMedia Express
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Given the mandate for Government e-services to support IPv6 by end 2012, businesses in Singapore are making moves to ensure that their web sites are reachable from both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. As a result, Internet services company NewMedia Express has been receiving many customer enquiries on its IPv6 readiness, said its Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Mr Alan Woo.
It was this business imperative - to meet the needs of its customers-that drove NewMedia Express to be one of the leaders in implementing IPv6 capabilities within the company. "For us, it is not so much a migration effort, but an additional service to our existing IPv4 network," said Mr Woo.
Established in 2003, NewMedia Express provides a comprehensive range of Internet services including domain name services (DNS), web design and e-commerce platforms.
With a rapidly expanding network infrastructure and increasing service coverage across Asia, NewMedia Express has attracted customers not just from the region, but also from Australia and the United States.
As a key player in the Internet ecosystem, therefore, NewMedia Express has had to upgrade its Internet infrastructure to be IPv6-ready.
IP addresses uniquely identify companies, individuals and computers and devices connected to the Internet. The recent exhaustion of 32-bit IPv4 addresses prompted NewMedia to "future proof" its business by upgrading its infrastructure to enable its customers' websites to be reachable by 128-bit IPv6 addresses - which will be the norm as IPv6 becomes the pre-dominant IP addressing system in the future.
Currently about 80 per cent of NewMedia's infrastructure - including the core network, hosts and software systems including DNS and web servers - are IPv6-ready. The upgrade of other systems such as e-mail and firewall is still in progress.
NewMedia uses a mechanism called dual stack to run both IPv4 and IPv6 concurrently. "Servers that we host can now have the added option of using an IPv6 address so that it can be reached by an IPv6 host," said Mr Woo.
To address IPv6-readiness, NewMedia Express acquired an IPv6 transit-the ability to route IPv6 traffic to network on the Internet-from local upstream provider StarHub. This is necessary because IPv4 is not intrinsically compatible with IPv6. NewMedia Express then began connecting to other IPv6 peers worldwide including Hurricane Electric, the largest IPv6 peer in the US.
In addition, it had to ensure that its equipment and software were also IPv6-ready. While NewMedia Express' core switches and routers from Cisco met this requirement, the company still needed to upgrade some of its operating system and applications. "There was indeed the need to change some of our legacy applications," Woo said. For example, NewMedia Express moved away from its old DNS server to PowerDNS for IPv6 support.
"Our previous DNS server called tinydns was not able to support IPv6, and we had to migrate to PowerDNS which is IPv6 compatible and has the ability to support DNS security extensions (DNSSEC) as well," Mr Woo explained.
In terms of operating systems, NewMedia Express' also had to upgrade to the most recent Linux builds, and a number of Windows Server 2003 users needed to be upgraded to Windows Server 2008 R2.
With this experience under its belt, NewMedia Express advises organisations moving to IPv6 to include upgrade of software systems as part of the transition plan, as certain software systems still lack IPv6 support. Companies should plan ample time to upgrade these software systems to compatible versions or, even to migrate to alternative software systems to ensure IPv6 support.
Mr Woo also advises organisations to make the IPv6 transition as soon as possible. "Even now, we are still testing different systems like our email software to ensure full-IPv6 compatibility," he said. "Many software systems are not IPv6-ready, so you have to give yourself ample time to migrate all your applications," he said.