To provide a holistic and insightful view to the data center by adopting best practices, Hurricane Electric (News - Alert), the IPv6-native Internet backbone and colocation provider, has upgraded its IPv6 Professional Services offerings to include data center deployments. The company has 45 major exchange points with connectivity to more than 1,800 different networks.

According to a press release, the company has recommended a swift transition to elude unnecessary costs and earn a competitive advantage. It is expected that the American Registry of Internet Numbers (ARIN (News - Alert)) will allocate its last IPv4 addresses before this year end. Hurricane has also offered easy guidelines for data center managers to comfortably do the transition and attain the benefits inherent in IPv6.

“From improved network topologies to build in IPSec, IPv6 can bring immediate benefits to the data center. By investing in good staff training, the average data center operator should have few problems deploying IPv6 and avoid costs later on down the road,” said Owen Delong, evangelist at Hurricane and director of professional services. “For those data center managers looking for some guidance and assistance, Hurricane Electric’s professional services division is available to assist.”

Delong says that transitioning to a dual-stack environment can be done by adding IPv6 capabilities to provisioning and monitoring systems, upgrading critical infrastructure (hardware and software) to support dual IPv4/IPv6 stacks, planning data center addressing and deployment, enabling IPv6 on your core and backbone, establishing IPv6 peering and transit sessions and adding IPv6 capabilities to external facing services, including email, web and DNS.

Delong has conducted the first IPv6 certification course in Mexico and has worked for the IPv6 Advisory Board for Infoblox (News - Alert), a developer of network infrastructure automation and control solutions. IPv6 is provided as a main service and every customer is being offered IPv6 connectivity, as well as classic IPv4 connectivity.

In other company news, Hurricane reported that 50 percent of well-connected service providers are IPv6 enabled.

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