With many new products being introduced in just the last few months of 2012, we can expect to see tremendous activity at the start of 2013 to implement much of it.

Data Center Ecomomies

The first and foremost driver of migration activity in the coming year will be the growing effort to drive costs out of computing and make IT more of a profit center. With new advances in virtualiztion and cloud computing we will see corporations reducing their hardware and carbon footprints and doing much more processing with much less hardware.

At the same time we can expect them to leverage the new and improved functionalities in management from products like Microsoft System Center to create dramatically better service levels for users even as they are reducing their costs.  This is where cost savings can turn to profit generation.

BYOD and the Year of the User

If 2012 wasn’t completely the Year of the User, 2013 definitely will be. Manufacturers will be competing aggressively to find the perfect cross-over from smartphone to tablet so users can do real work and communicate flexibly all on the same device.Some have already dubbed this the “phablet,” which we all hope will be replaced with something more professional sounding… The security, privacy and compliance balance against the need for an exceptional user experience will be solved in 2013 finally enabling a tremendous transition to a reliable, dependable BYOD strategy. 

This will also improve sustainability as more and more information workers stop commuting and start working from wherever they are.

IPv6 and the Internet of Things

Already we have seen wireless IP integrated into many devices for control and communication. You can unlock and start many new cars from your smartphone. Many now have their own internal Wi-Fi hotspot and serve up Internet-delivered content. Home theater and security systems can be controlled from a tablet or smartphone, with other home appliances following right behind.

In the industrial setting, tablets are being used to control manufacturing processes and monitor emissions and other levels. All manner of office equipment can now be monitored and managed from your desktop. 

The challenge is that each of these devices requires its own IP address, and the world ran out of those two years ago on Jan. 31, 2011, when the IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, distributed the last blocks to regional exchanges. The current 32-bit Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) system only provides 4.3 billion addresses and they are all spoken for.

The proliferation of new devices requiring addresses is not the only concern. Server virtualization has enabled us to pack dozens of server “instances” onto a single piece of hardware. Already several manufacturers have introduced servers that can run hundreds of server sessions. Each of those server sessions requires its own IP address. Multiply the number of virtualized servers by hundreds. Add that to the new need for addresses.

Fortunately, the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force, began work on replacing the IPv4 addressing system more than 20 years ago, and transitions to the new IPv6 began over the last decade. Of course, with the IPv4 addresses running out the urgency around migrating to the IPv6 system has increased tremendously.

Or has it?

The U.S. government recently acknowledged that it has seriously missed its self-imposed Oct. 1, 2012, deadline for complete transition to IPv6. It's not even close. And recent articles coming out of the U.K. condemn its government for inaction. Some European and Asia Pacific countries are moving along, but none are near complete.

The corporate analysis is even more bleak. Simply put, nobody seems to be paying attention to the need to migrate to IPv6. Left like this, we could be finding ourselves with our next “Y2K” level disaster in the next few years. The time to start planning and executing this critical migration is now. Companies must at least establish a hybrid capability using tunneling or dual-stack approaches to running both IPv4 and IPv6 in their environment.

Migration 2013

These are the core migrations we’ll be watching and talking about here in the Zone in the coming year. Please share your observations and concerns with us by commenting on these posts.  Happy New Year!