World IPv6 Day: Damp squib or roaring success?
I admit I was sceptical about World IPv6 Day. Not because I thought it would cause a lot of problems, that fear didn’t come until much closer to the date, but more because I didn’t see the point and thought it was more likely to be both a public relations stunt from the companies involved, and also a tactic to delay deploying IPv6 for good.
I’m glad to say I was wrong. Mainly.
As far as JANET(UK) is concerned, we didn’t receive a single World IPv6 Day related support call (I’d be interested to hear if you manage a JANET site and did receive calls). Someone did notice that Juniper’s website fell off the Internet for a little while on the day, but that was due to a few errors Juniper made managing their DNS.
More than not having any reported disruption, we saw a substantial jump in native IPv6 traffic with our peers and providers. This is a graph of the external (i.e. traffic coming across the interfaces to JANET’s transit providers and peers and not counting JANET to JANET traffic) IPv6 traffic the Monday before World IPv6 Day, an average day in the UK, not a public holiday, and this level is representative of what we’d been seeing recently.
External IPv6 Traffic, 2011-06-06
A maximum of around 30Mbit/s at a time when our overall external traffic is about 70Gbit/s, or 0.04%. Also note that it is very ‘peaky’ suggesting it is dominated by single transfers between a few hosts. A few hours into World IPv6 Day, this is what the graph looked like.
External IPv6 Traffic during World IPv6 Day
When World IPv6 Day started at 00:00 UTC, 01:00 BST (the time on the graph is in BST), there was an immediate jump, and in contrast to the first graph, a clear diurnal pattern starts to emerge, far less dominated by the peaks. The morning after World IPv6 Day, the graph looked like this.
External IPv6 Traffic covering all of World IPv6 Day
A maximum five-minute average of over 220Mbit/s! In contrast to 70Gbit/s this is still small beer, but 0.3% is almost an order of magnitude more than we had been seeing, and after all, World IPv6 Day was not about enabling access networks, it was about enabling services, predominantly HTTP, and seeing what broke. What this graph shows is that there are some networks out there in JANET with IPv6 enabled. These are mainly at a handful of sites, but hopefully we can build on their experience. To put it into context, here is a weekly graph of external IPv6 traffic, for World IPv6 Day and the six previous days.
External IPv6 traffic leading up to World IPv6 Day
The values here are averaged over a slightly longer period, so the maximum value is lower.
World IPv6 Day was just a one-day experiment, and the large content providers were always going to remove the ‘AAAA’ DNS records at the end of it. Not everybody did though, and even some of the big guys left the DNS entries in for some of their services, such as the caches that serve user videos from YouTube. What would that mean for the traffic come Thursday, Friday and the weekend? This is what it meant.
External IPv6 traffic, week of World IPv6 Day
This is, of course, still much less than 1% of all our external traffic, but hopefully World IPv6 Day will have proven that IPv6 can be deployed for content delivery, and on a campus network. This is also only a count of native traffic, there may have been some more that was tunnelled to external relays or tunnel brokers.
To answer the question at the top, World IPv6 Day was both a damp squib because nothing went wrong, and a roaring success for the very same reason.
The obvious question now is ‘what next?’ ISOC is considering another World IPv6 Day to allow content providers that missed the first one to jump on the bandwagon, and perhaps a World IPv6 Access Day. Others are stating that content delivery is now a ’solved problem’ and the industry needs to move onto access networks. If the content delivery is a solved problem, I’d like to see the content providers roll out IPv6 permanently, at which point the ‘killer app’ for IPv6 becomes IPv4 exhaustion and deployment of IPv6 will follow. Perhaps.
Interesting stats on how v6 traffic has generally been higher since IPv6 day.
As you say, some participants switched their AAAAs off quickly, others are still around. There’s some detail on when AAAAs became available and when/if they disappeared at:
http://v6day.ripe.net/cgi-bin/dns-aggr.cgi
[...] deployment to see what impact the extra IPv6 content would have on their systems. Rob Evans wrote a blog article in which he showed how JANET IPv6 traffic grew for the day, up from 20-30 Mbit/s to 200 Mbit/s+. [...]