[arin-discuss] IPv6 Provider Woes

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> perhaps a /32 for a each datacenter can 
> make sense in the current allocation policy framework if each 
> is multihomed and each is multitenant. 

That was my assumption. However I believe that current
policy only considers the multihoming, not multi-tenancy.
And cloud computing kind of blurs the edges of 
multi-tenancy.

> but if these are 
> single homed or single enterprise, i think the community's 
> consensus will be something like "please build yourself a 
> backbone, or use provider-assigned (hierarchical) space."

Agreed.

The reason I raised this issue is because it should be 
straightforward for two companies to each build a single
data center and each get an ASN and IP allocation from 
ARIN. Then if one company buys the other, you have the 
scenario from the beginning of the discussion where one
company has two or more data centres that have no network
connectivity between them. I expect to see more of this
situation in the next few years as the cloud computing
concept leads to new data centres.

And I also wonder if the transition to IPv6 will lead to
new peering architectures where data centres end up at
the top tier (network core) as valuable peering partners.
One driver for this is that I expect network operators
to take a tough look at what is core business and in
at least some cases, data centers will be considered
non-core, but even after outsourcing they will want
low-latency connectivity to them.

--Michael Dillon