Councils: Make more IPv6 products available

Government acquisition councils want IPv6-capable products readily available for agencies, according to a notice in today’s Federal Register.

The Civilian Agency Acquisition Council and the Defense Acquisition Regulations Council proposed amending the Federal Acquisition Regulation to require information technology procurements to include IPv6 products as often as possible, the notice states.

Agencies can reduce the cost of upgrades and the complexity of transitioning to IPv6 by integrating requirements into federal contracts, the notice states.

The Office of Management and Budget issued a memo Aug. 2, 2005, telling agencies to transition to IPv6. The directive requires agencies to build IPv6 network backbones by June 2008.

The protocol is one of the primary instruments that define how and where information moves across networks. Currently, IPv4 is the industry standard. It has about 4.3 billion IP address spaces, too few to sustain the Internet’s needs, many observers say. Address space is a concern driving the transition to IPv6.

IPv6 is designed to significantly increase address space, promote flexibility and functionality and enhance security.