June 6, 2012 is a big day in the history of Information Technology. On this day, approximately 1% of Internet traffic will leverage IPv6. Not to worry if you only have a local area network that doesn’t use public IP addresses.

We’ll likely be able to maintain our private address spaces for the foreseeable future with technologies that broker our Internet connectivity correctly to the mixed IPv4 and IPv6 Internet. This means our private network investments and configuration can go largely unchanged. Changing all internal addressing schemes is complicated enough; the thought of changing all workstations, servers, printers and network infrastructure to IPv6 doesn’t appeal to me at all. The only exception would be if an internal address space is becoming exhausted – if that happens to you business then you really need to sit down and determine of you really need all those devices internally.