Singapore's top employment website deploys IPv6 to ensure its services remain accessible when users eventually flip the switch to the latest Internet network protocol system.
Mr Ted Targosz, business development
and operations manager at JobStreet
|
Driven by the need to future-proof its businesses, JobStreet started deploying its IPv6 network more than six months ago. The pan-Asian job portal serves over 80,000 corporate customers and 10 million jobseekers across Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, India, Japan and Thailand. Therefore, it is important for the company to ensure IPv6 is supported in its services deployed in fast growing economies which may adopt IPv6 relatively earlier. Transitioning to IPv6 enhances JobStreet's ability in reaching out to a broader regional customer set.
Ted Targosz, business development and operations manager at JobStreet, said: "As the Internet community deploys IPv6, we will have to be prepared as there will come a point when customers will not be able to use IPv4 networks to access our services. Moving to IPv6 ensures our services will continue to be accessible to users before everyone else - when IPv6 takes off."
In Singapore, JobStreet operates Careers@Gov civil service job portal. "To align with the overall initiative to make Government's online services accessible via IPv6, we're making Careers@Gov accessible through IPv6." Targosz said.
To address the IPv4 address crunch, some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have turned to carrier grade network address translation gateway (CGN) as a stopgap solution. CGN is based on the use of private IPv4 addresses which get translated to a smaller shared pool of public IPv4 addresses. However, this approach creates bottlenecks due to the translation and degrades the user experience.
"We've made the necessary technical assessment and decided that we should prepare for the scenario where ISPs also offer native IPv6 instead of private IPv4 based on CGN. We also believe that any intermediary translation between the user and our services could pose performance issues," Targosz said. JobStreet's strategy is to provide full IP connectivity so that its services can be reached through both IPv4 and IPv6 networks.
Modest investment set to pay off
Targosz revealed that the company's capital investment in IPv6 was "relatively modest". This is because JobStreet's network was designed to be scalable from the onset, allowing the company to deploy IPv6 with minimal investment.
According to Targosz, the bulk of its deployment cost went into manpower to perform the necessary modifications and testing to ensure JobStreet's software applications will continue to work in an IPv6 environment. "Getting an IPv6 network up is relatively easy, but our applications are internally developed around IPv4, so we had to reconfigure our hosting architecture and upgrade our operating systems," he said.
Fortunately for JobStreet, the company's engineers are well versed in the mechanics of transitioning to IPv6. "The first thing we did was to get IPv6 connectivity into our co-location network at our primary data centre. This turned out to be the most challenging part of the process," Targosz said.
According to Targosz, the challenges stem from teething issues like dependencies on upstream service providers to implement IPv6 services correctly, and the extensive tests required to ensure existing services will not be adversely affected.
"Despite the difficulties encountered, we are glad to say that it has been a worthwhile effort going through this transition to achieve our current state of IPv6 readiness. We expect the ISPs to be more experienced with IPv6 provisioning now," he added.
While JobStreet's primary data centre was ahead of the pack in supporting IPv6, its secondary data centre was not IPv6-ready. That means JobStreet could not turn on IPv6 for all its websites across the region at the same time, Targosz said.
Its IPv6 transition has been implemented for Singapore and will subsequently be done for other countries, including Malaysia and Indonesia by 2013. The readiness of data centre providers in offering IPv6 services is critical to the IPv6 deployment plan, Targosz added.
Progressive adoption
Targosz noted that while there is growing awareness of IPv6, the technology would only take off when consumers jump on the bandwagon.
According to the European Regional Internet Registry (RIPE), the list of top 20 IPv6 ready nations include a handful of Southeast Asia countries. It reported that about 37.1 per cent of networks in Malaysia and 29.1 per cent in Singapore can work with IPv6 traffic. Other Asian jurisdictions that made it into the list include Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Daniel Karrenberg, chief scientist at RIPE, told BBC News that transition to IPv6 "was going to be helped by the fact that router and modem makers were producing hardware that could handle both IPv4 and IPv6".
Although IPv6 adoption is likely to be progressive, it is expected to accelerate in future as many developing nations cannot obtain enough IPv4 addresses to support the growing number of Internet users. The number of IPv6 connections in India, for example, has grown by over 120 per cent over the past decade.
Start early to stay ahead
According to the U.S. Department of Commerce Technology Administration, companies can reduce costs in network downtime by taking advantage of IPv6's new security model. The simplified network management capabilities of IPv6 will also allow companies to configure their networks based on usage growth and respond quickly to changing market demands for Internet services.
Also, the peer-to-peer capability of IPv6 has allowed companies such as global construction company Bechtel to set up new mesh networks at construction sites on the fly to support up to 50,000 workers.
Companies can reap these benefits by transitioning to IPv6 early. "The quicker you plan and start on your transition, the better as this will give you more time to identify and overcome, if not plan to prevent potential deployment problems you may have," Targosz said. "You will also be ready for IPv6 ahead of everyone else when IPv4 addresses eventually run out."
Businesses that need information to support their IPv6 transition plans can visit IDA's IPv6 Transition Programme website (
/ipv6
). "The IPv6 Market Place at the IDA website is very valuable for sourcing for IPv6 consultancy services, which have been difficult to find," Targosz said. "IDA has also been very helpful in putting us in contact with training providers and consultants."
Since early 2012, JobStreet's website is already IPv6 accessible. It's also one of many companies from Singapore joining along with Google, Facebook and Cisco in the global World IPv6 Launch to signify its commitment towards a global IPv6-enabled Internet.