With the initial IPv6 deployment now completed, the next steps will be to continue to rollout IPv6 over the rest of the campus and extend its functionality to provide a more complete set of services. This will proceed in three parts, the first of which will complete the deployment of IPv6 in the Computing Department, making it widely available in both the office and research networks. The second will continue to upgrade the University’s IPv6 deployment both in terms of the physical deployment over campus to interested groups and departments beyond ourselves and upgrading network services to make them fully IPv6 compatible. Finally, as a long term goal, there must be an effort to offer IPv6 in a ubiquitous manner across the entire campus network and use this to deploy new IPv6 services such as multicast, QoS and mobility.

Immediate Goals

The immediate goals are those related to completing the next stages of IPv6 deployment and include the wider deployment of production IPv6 in the Computing department and the provision of the core IPv6 services such as DNS. With the general deployment of IPv6 in our department, the first use of production IPv6 address space is now occurring and as such represents a significant deployment milestone.

Completing the Campus Rollout

This stage of IPv6 deployment will involve completing the deployment of IPv6 dual stack over the campus backbone by resolving the outstanding issues (particularly with the BlackDiamond 10k) along with the upgrade of essential networking services such as DNS to support the deployment, this has already been largely completed. This provides a basic level of connectivity and will allow production access to the IPv6 Internet. Thereafter, there are will be two parts of the continued deployment, the provision of more IPv6-enabled services and the continued rollout of IPv6 connectivity to other interested groups and departments.

Now that the core IPv6 infrastructure has been deployed, connectivity can be extended on an ‘as necessary’ basis, initially only to those who request it. There is no obvious limit to the potential rollout of IPv6 to the rest of the campus and so it becomes a matter of policy as to when this actually takes place. The continued provision of IPv6 services will initially include those outlined such as email,www access, file sharing, etc. The goal here will be to continually dual stack enable networking services over time to eventually provide an IPv6 service equivalent to the existing IPv4 infrastructure.