All Napatech PCI-Express network adapters now benefit from full IPv6 support, according Napatech.
The company, an OEM supplier of multi-port 10 GbE and 1 GbE intelligent adapters, expects IPv6 usage to grow along substantially in the next five years. In a press release to EH Publishing, Napatech states, “IPv6 usage is expected to grow with IPv4 addresses running out and the number of Internet users set to increase by 45 percent.”
“Napatech has therefore ensured,” the press release continues, “that the advanced packet capture, analysis, and transmission capabilities offered for IPv4 today are also supported for IPv6.”
Napatech president Erik Norup has made similar statements. “IPv6 is here and is becoming more important as new IP-based services are being rolled out to a growing number of users,” he says. “It is therefore important to have the capability to monitor and analyze IPv6 traffic with the same precision and detail as IPv4 traffic.”
Current projections indicate that the IANA’s pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses will be exhausted by late 2011. At the same time, Forrester Research predicts that the number of people online will grow 45 percent to 2.2 billion users by 2013.
IPv6 is enabled by default in the latest versions of Windows, Linux, Apple, and Solaris. It is a requirement in 4G mobile network standards, such as Long Term Evolution.
Napatech’s network adapters provide full line-rate packet capture, analysis, and transmission of IPv4 and IPv6 packets. Full IPv6 header decoding is provided, including header extensions.
Napatech network adapters also recognize tunneling, protocols such as SCTP, GTP, and GRE as well as a number of encapsulation methods, such as VLANs, multiple MPLS labels, and Cisco ISL. This enables advanced filtering, flow identification, and flow distribution to up to 32 CPU cores where hash keys based on IPv6 can now be used to identify flows.
