The surprising results of an IPv6 census conducted by the Measurement Factory and sponsored by Infoblox are that the lion’s share of actual working IPv6 nodes are being hosted by Go Daddy. I know, any excuse to plug their spokesmodel Danica Patrick is shameless, but what is really going on here?
In their census, the number of active IPv6 addresses went from 1.27% of all overall IP addresses in the 2010 sample to 25.4% in the 2011 sample. And more than 80% of the v6 addresses are being hosted by Go Daddy.
Go Daddy’s Chief Technology Officer, Dave Koopman, told us that “Go Daddy sees IPv6 enabled services as critical to the continued growth of the Internet. Go Daddy has completed Glue records, /32 allocations from ARIN, RIPE and APNIC with transit to all of our data centers worldwide, and most recently, as noted, our entire 30MM+ customer DNS system is running on IPv6 dual stack. Soon, we’ll have IPv6 on our Dedicated, Virtual Dedicated, and Fourth-Generation Web Hosting. All of Go Daddy corporate websites and products will use IPv6 dual stack” eventually. Here is somewhat dated but a more complete explanation and links to their implementation.
“Go Daddy’s adoption of IPv6 illustrates how a single large registrar can have substantial influence on global IPv6 adoption,” according to the release that accompanied the census results.
According to the census, which was done by scanning .com, org and .net domains, the majority of IPv6 nodes were not Web and email servers, which have been slow to pick up the new protocols. “Registrars often run mail and Web servers for their customers but most do not yet support IPv6 on those servers, indicating adoption by major registrars could result in more substantial gains in IPv6 adoption,” the report stated.
Infoblox suggested some next steps to help improve IPv6 penetration:
- Registrars should start fully supporting IPv6, externally on name servers and their email and web servers.
- End-user organizations should ask their registrars about plans to support IPv6 and consider alternatives if they don’t get a good answer.
- End-user organizations should make sure they have a DNS implementation that fully supports IPv6.
Infoblox is a global leader in automated IT network control solutions and has several tools to handle IP address management.
