25 years of production IPv6 in ESnet
Twenty-five years ago Saturday, on August 3, 1999, IPv6 history was made: ESnet was issued its IPv6 production netblock, which is still in use today. The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) assigned the very first block out of its 2001:400::/23 allocation, and since then, ESnet has numbered its production IPv6 services out of 2001:400::/32. (The netblock would have originally been a /35, later increased to /32 automatically by the RIRs.)
This was the first production IPv6 address allocation in North America, and possibly the world. Akira Kato, a global Internet pioneer, member of the WIDE Project, and a professor at Keio University, notes that the WIDE project did receive the first allocation in the Asia-Pacific region 8 days after the allocation of ESnet’s space. WIDE, along with its sub-project, KAME, would go on to develop critical IPv6 software, some of which is still in use today. (WIDE continues to have the numerically-lowest globally routable production IPv6 address, 2001:200::/32.)
IPv6 is the current generation Internet Protocol, and it has been in an extended process of supplanting the now-legacy IPv4. Developed in the early 1990s, it was adopted by ESnet as part of a larger effort to lead by example–by embracing cutting-edge protocols and technologies. IPv6’s massive address space was originally seen as a way of effectively “saving the Internet” from potential collapse due to the exhaustion of IPv4’s more limited address space. While mechanisms such as network address translation (NAT) were developed to extend IPv4’s life, ESnet quickly recognized the drawbacks that these mechanisms created, especially in the high-performance computing and networking environments ESnet supported. Hence, the move to IPv6 was an obvious one for ESnet, and the organization encouraged other National Labs to follow suit.
