Fremont, California - March 15, 2011 - Hurricane Electric, the world’s largest IPv6-native Internet backbone and colocation provider, today announced that its IPv6 Evangelist, Owen DeLong, will lead a new professional services division dedicated to assisting enterprises with their transition to IPv6. The new division will consult with organizations of all sizes, ensuring that their networking infrastructure is ready for the transition.

On February 3rd, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) distributed the last 5 blocks of IPv4 addresses to the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). It is likely that the RIRs will distribute these addresses to ISPs and other organizations by around September of 2011. After this happens, there will be no IPv4 addresses left – the supply will be exhausted.

Enterprises that delay the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 will eventually experience connectivity-related issues and associated financial losses. For example, ecommerce sites that fail to make the transition run the risk of revenue losses if consumers cannot connect to their site.

Despite the effort required to transition to IPv6, IPv6 has tremendous long-term benefits and the ROI is strong now. According to a US Commerce Department study, ongoing benefits to the global economy of $10 billion/year will result from IPv6 adoption.

"Today's global challenge is adding IPv6 capabilities to each and every connected device," said Owen DeLong, Hurricane Electric’s IPv6 Evangelist and Director of Hurricane Electric’s IPv6 Professional Services Division. "For over ten years, Hurricane Electric has built a reputation as a leader in IPv6, and we intend to use our experience to help organizations employ tactics that reduce transition costs and network interruption."

Benefits arising from IPv6’s increased address space include:

• More capacity for new customers of connectivity services.
• More opportunities for new services and applications. Smart-grid (appliances and utilities), interconnected automobiles, multicast-based content services, etc.
• "The network effect" – The more people on the network, the more valuable the network becomes. IPv6 allows us to connect a much larger population to the network than IPv4.
• More capacity for "always-on" and virtualized services (multiple virtual addresses per physical machine).
• True "end-to-end" addressing is restored, which enables improvements in existing services (like VOIP) and eliminates the need for IPv4 address translation. Packet routing becomes more efficient, and computer-security systems can become more accurate.

An IPv6 leader for over a decade, Hurricane Electric first deployed IPv6 on its global backbone in 2001. Hurricane Electric’s global Internet backbone is one of the few that is IPv6-native and does not rely on internal tunnels for IPv6 connectivity. IPv6 is offered as a core service and every customer is provided IPv6 connectivity, as well as classic IPv4 connectivity. Hurricane Electric connects to more than 1,200 associated IPv6 backbones.

Hurricane Electric’s global Internet backbone is one of the few that is IPv6-native at each and every customer connection and at each and every location it operates at. First deployed on Hurricane Electric’s Internet backbone in 2001, IPv6 is offered as a core service and every customer is provided IPv6 connectivity. In addition to operating the world’s largest IPv6 network, Hurricane Electric connects to more than 1,100 associated IPv6 networks.

In addition to its professional services division, Hurricane Electric offers free IPv6 certification, DNS services and tunnel broker service. As way to keep the IT and networking community abreast of new IPv6 developments, in 2010 Hurricane Electric launched a YouTube channel that provides weekly updates on the state of IPv6 transition.

Hurricane Electric offers IPv4 and IPv6 transit solutions over the same connection, at speeds up to 10 Gbps. Within its own global network, the company has 45 major exchange points with connectivity to more than 1,600 different networks. Employing a resilient fiber-optic topology, Hurricane Electric has no less than four redundant paths crossing North America, two separate paths between the U.S. and Europe, and rings in Europe and Asia.

About Hurricane Electric
Hurricane Electric is a leading Internet backbone and colocation provider. Hurricane Electric operates its own global IPv4 and IPv6 network and owns several data centers in Fremont, California, running multiple N-by-10 Gbps links throughout North America, Europe and Asia. Founded by Mike Leber in his garage in 1994, Hurricane Electric now operates the largest IPv6 Internet Backbone in the world as measured by the number of networks connected.

For additional information on Hurricane Electric, please visit http://www.he.net.