Allied Telesis IPv6 User Manual 2

Solutions Guide

High Availability IPv6

Introduction

The Internet has forever changed

contemporary society, with online
access an integral part of our 21st
century lifestyles. Finding out what
movie is on, or the location of a
restaurant when out with your smart­phone, shopping online and booking
your next holiday are just a few of
the things we now take for granted.
Businesses rely on online resources
more than ever, with everything from
standard access to email and servers,
to business critical applications such as
medical systems, transpor t signalling,
and security requiring a high availability
network.

The Internet and networks in general

rely on Internet Protocol (IPv4)
addresses for connectivity and to
manage communication between
separate systems as well as individual
devices. The extraordinary growth of
connected systems and devices has
necessitated a move towards using
the next generation IP communication
protocol, known as IPv6.

Allied Telesis networks provide small,

medium and large organizations
with a cost-effective solution for
resilient, wirespeed IPv4 and IPv6
communication.

Allied Telesis offers high-availability

solutions across a range of Layer 3
switch products, with a wide choice of
Ethernet port combinations and price/
performance options. We are able
to offer solutions to everyone from
small schools to urban rail systems
to businesses with thousands of
employees.

In our key medical and transport
sectors, network-based applications
may be sensitive to even a few
seconds of communication failure.

We understand that a high availability

infrastructure is no longer a luxury;
maintaining resource availability and
data security is now of paramount
importance.

This solution explores the key Allied
Telesis technologies that ensure a

smooth transition to IPv6 networking
to provide a high availability
infrastructure, including the dynamic
routing of data.

Benefits

The principal benefits of the high
availability IPv6 solution are:

» Resiliency

» Ease of management

» Ease of transition from IPv4

» Scalability

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Next generation network transition

Allied Telesis solutions offer the same
levels of performance, high availability
and manageability for both IPv4 and IPv6
networks. As you move from a current
IPv4 network to a next generation
IPv6 network, some transition will be
required to ensure the new network
will communicate with other local and
remote devices and systems. Allied
Telesis provide two mechanisms to
facilitate this transition; dual stack and
tunnelling.

With dual stacking, IPv4 and IPv6
can co-exist seamlessly on the same
equipment, using equivalent routing
protocols, within the same topology.
An organization can be condent that
the network will support their transition
from IPv4 to IPv6 at a pace that suits
them. Their IPv6 network can be
overlaid on the same equipment, in the
same physical and logical layout, as their
original IPv4 network.

The equipment can be managed equally
by IPv4 or IPv6, enabling a smooth
transition of the network management
infrastructure as well.

Tunnelling allows IPv6 trafc to be
encapsulated within IPv4 packets. This
means an organization wishing to move
to IPv6 can do so even if their Internet
and other remote connectivity still
require IPv4.

As modern networks have grown in
both size and functionality, dynamic
routing protocols have been employed
to manage trafc paths and load across
the various devices and components
of the network. Newer versions of
these dynamic routing protocols have
been created to support the increasing
prevalence of IPv6. For example OSPFv3
is an update on OSPFv2 to support IPv6
networks.

Allied Telesis IP transition technologies,
and support for the latest versions
of commonly used dynamic routing
protocols, ensure an easy transition to
next generation networking, without
having to change infrastructure or
update key networking components.

In particular, the area layout and subnet
allocation used for IPv4 with OSPFv2
can be overlaid with an equivalent
structure for IPv6 with OSPFv3.
Thereby, the logical network structure
that has been established for an existing
IPv4 network can seamlessly carry over
to the coexisting IPv6 network as
shown in diagram 1 on page 4.

Allied Telesis creates off-the-shelf
switches and routers with feature­rich, high-performance IPv4 and
IPv6 implementations in the same
box.

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