RE: router lifetime

[Brandon Kim <brandon.kim () brandontek com>]

I'm tasked to replace our core switches which run Extreme 6800's. You are right that some older gear says they support 
IPv6,
but then you find out it's not 100% fully compliant. Our switch is about 6-8 years old I beleive so it's time to update 
them.
We're thinking about the Cisco 6504e. Anything that is pretty modern that we feel will yield us another 6-8 years.
I only have a handful of juniper firewalls laying around for lab equipment, so I don't really have that much experience 
with them.

We also need to get IPv6 space from ARIN so that we can fully support IPv6 natively. Our plan is to dual-stack our edge 
routers,
so it is ultimately up to the endpoints to support IPv6. We don't want to deal with any tunneling protocols like Teredo 
for IPV6.


> Date: Sun, 3 Oct 2010 00:29:27 -0700
> From: franck () genius com
> To: nanog () nanog org
> Subject: Re: router lifetime
>
>
>
>
>
> From: "Brandon Kim" <brandon.kim () brandontek com> 
> To: franck () genius com, nanog () nanog org 
> Sent: Saturday, 2 October, 2010 6:22:27 PM 
> Subject: RE: router lifetime 
>
> Well a lot of routers even 3 years ago support IPv6. You can dual-stack pretty much any router today if you have 
> the right IOS. But I do understand your concern, if you want to future proof your purchase, I'd think any modern 
> router today with a good support contract will take care of you for quite some time. 
> Make sure it's not close to EOL. 
>
> What kind of router are you considering? Is this for a large network? What are the network needs? 
>
>
> Well it is not for me really. It is a kind of a survey. In your environment, how often do you replace your gear? 
>
> I found out that switch gear from cisco with layer 3 routing, which are EOL today do not do IPv6 (at layer 3). Cisco 
> Firewalls do not support well IPv6 unless you have upgraded this year, and for load balancers, you are out of luck. 
> So basically anything which is EOL today has IPv6 issues while still much in use in production environment. Is that a 
> fair assessment? I found out also that some gear with fancy IPv4 stuff do not do the same in IPv6, What about 
> Juniper? 
>
> Then there is the IPv6 is not done at hardware level, because software is fast enough for the current IPv6 bandwidth, 
> but then if you expect to keep your gear for 8 years... Will you have to replace it much earlier than expected? 
>
> It seems to me on the desktop/server, IPv6 is there free of charge (enabled by default), but on the network, 
> switching to IPv6 is not free nor trivial.