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This article focuses on the efforts of Asian companies to promote adoption of the next-generation Internet Protocol (IP) called IPv6. The IPv4, limits the Internet to approximately 4 billion unique addresses. Because U.S. companies control the majority of those addresses, there has been no hurry to deploy IPv6 in the U.S. By contrast, however, Asian companies, backed by government investments and mandates, have been aggressively rolling out IPv6. But more than balancing supply and demand, Asian governments and companies also see IPv6 as a business opportunity, an opportunity to innovate and leapfrog the rest of the world. By making it easier to assign Internet addresses to devices and services, IPv6 could accelerate adoption of new applications such as third generation mobile services, gaming, smart consumer appliances, smart sensors, home automation and voice over IP. That potential for innovation may prove to be the biggest driver for IPv6 adoption in the U.S., as Asian IPv6-enabled products make their way westward. The biggest advantage of IPv6 global addressing will be its capability of facilitating applications that require fast, plug-and-play connections among peer devices on the edge of the network. INSETS: Where Are We Now?;VoIp and IPv6: A Perfect Pair.

The article presents a crash course on router redundancy protocols as well as the applications of routing protocols, such as Open Shortest Path First-Equal Cost Multipath, IEEE 802.1w and Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol, in the removal of single failure points to keep multi-vendor network equipment and connections running without interruptions in the U.S. Planning and training strategies for the implementation of the routing protocols, which may involve software upgrades and new routers and switches, are also discussed. INSET: SINGLE-VENDOR ADVANTAGES..

The article reports on the benefits provided by network file systems (NFS) in businesses in the U.S. It states that running virtual machines on NFS provides several architectural advantages, starting with the fact that virtual machines use files to store their image information. New offerings, such as scalable caching appliances, allow customers to extract more performance out if their existing network-attached systems (NAS) and NFS infrastructure, are also beneficial. Moreover, by deploying NAS and NFS storage solutions, administrators can forgo many of the complexities associated with maintaining separate Fibre Channel adapters, switches and storage systems.

The article provides information on XORP open-source routing project, a start-up developing enterprise routers developed by Om Malik in the U.S. Malik believes that this start-up would undermine the routing sales of Cisco. While Networking Pipeline's Preston Gralla predicts that XORP could demise the vendors selling high margin networking hardware. Through this routing protocol, replacement of Cisco's Interior Gateway Routing Protocol would be possible. However, business enterprises would not replace the Cisco core router with XORP equivalent, since XORP's performance is slower than Cisco.