How much management and maintenance have you needed to do since completing the IPv6 migration?
Junkins: It takes a little bit of care and maintenance just to make sure your network is being used as efficiently as possible and performance that you're providing . But by enabling IPv6 and IPv4 at the same time, we can do a lot of that tuning for both of them together, rather than having to tune IPv4 and IPv6 separately.
We've done a lot of work with the tools that we use to manage our network to be able to tune IPv4 and IPv6 concurrently and offer the best performance possible for our customers. [We use] some homegrown router configuration tools that … manage all of the configurations on our equipment and some off-the-shelf software that helps us engineer the traffic patterns on our network.
What have been the biggest benefits of completing your IPv6 migration ahead of the pack?
Junkins: I think the biggest benefit we had was being able to demonstrate that IPv6 was a viable technology to use. Also, by deploying it very early, we've built relationships with the right people within the vendor community -- within the Cisco [Systems] organization, the Juniper [Networks] organization -- to have a little closer interaction with the engineers there who are doing their IPv6 work and [to work] directly with them to make sure the features that we need in IPv6 are being implemented.
This article originally appeared on SearchTelecom.com