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Defense Department Teams With UNH-IOL

Posted on: Monday, 20 October 2003, 06:00 CDT

DURHAM, N.H.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 20, 2003--

Fortune 100 companies pool technology resources in six-month interoperability pilot project for IPv6 protocol

The U.S. military and every major networking company in the country have joined forces to launch the most aggressive test bed yet of next-generation Internet technology, known in the industry as IPv6, the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) has announced.

For the next six months, the Moonv6 project, a collaboration between industry, engineers, and several U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) organizations, will operate the largest multi-vendor IPv6 network to date. The network will provide the North American market with strong validation for IPv6 by testing and demonstrating the technology's effectiveness. The UNH-IOL has completed phase I, the project's initial interoperability and test period, which ran October 7 - October 17. The network will continue to serve as a nation-wide proving ground for use by industry, universities, research labs, Internet providers, the DoD and other government agencies, assisting in the evolution of the next-generation Internet protocol for full, wide-scale adoption and deployment throughout North America. Phase II begins in January 2004.

"Future combat and defense systems need network ubiquity, mobility and security that the current Internet protocol, IPv4, cannot provide," said Major Roswell V. Dixon, JITC tactical data systems/IPv6 test director. "The lack of security and flexibility in the current protocol has hampered efforts to build next-generation secure communications. The joint effort of the Moonv6 project has established a large-scale IP-distributed test and demonstration network with realistic implementation and architecture that addresses interoperability and reinforces the viability of IPv6."

While the majority of the testing has taken place at the UNH-IOL and the JITC base at Fort Huachuca, A.Z., the network includes application servers running at Fort Monmouth, N.J.; the Space and Naval Warfare (SPAWAR) Systems Centers in Charleston, N.C. and San Diego, Calif.; the Air Force Communications Command (AFCC) headquarters in Scott AFB, Ill.; and the Marine Corps Network Operations and Security Command (MCNOSC) center in Quantico, V.A.

The Moonv6 organization's primary IPv6 test event involved approximately 80 servers, switches and routers configured in dual stack mode, with IPv4 and IPv6 running in tandem. Participants ran applications end-to-end over a professionally designed local topology and to other sites to determine how routers and servers would interact on both local and wide area networks. The test results, which as a matter of UNH-IOL policy are only made publicly available in a generic format, proved that the protocol is indeed robust and stable enough for large-scale implementation.

"North America has plenty of network addresses, but Asia and Europe are running out of them, leaving North America in danger of becoming an island of IPv4 in an IPv6 world," said Ben Schultz, managing engineer at UNH-IOL. "The success of this event should effectively clear the way for wide industry adoption of IPv6 throughout the North American market."

The full list of participating communications service providers, equipment vendors and test equipment companies is as follows:

-- Service providers / laboratories:

Chunghwa Telecom; France Telecom; NTT R&D; Root Server Test Bed; Sprint; UNH-IOL; U.S. Department of Defense. AT&T will be participating in phase II of the event.

-- Test equipment vendors:

Agilent Technologies; Ixia; Navtel Communications; Spirent Communications.

-- Networking equipment vendors:

6Wind; Checkpoint Communications; Cisco Systems; Elmic Systems; EMC; Extreme Networks; Foundry Networks; Fujitsu; Hewlett Packard; Hitachi; Hexago; IBM; IP Infusion; Juniper Networks; NEC; Nokia; Procket Networks; Microsoft; S-Net Systems; SUN Microsystems; Windriver.

About Moonv6

The Moonv6 project is a collaborative effort between the NAv6TF, the UNH-IOL the JITC and various other DoD agencies and I2. Taking place across the U.S. at multiple locations, the Moonv6 project represents the most aggressive collaborative IPv6 interoperability and application demonstration event in the North American market to date. For more information, visit the organization's Web site at http://www.moonv6.org.

About the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL)

Established in 1988, the UNH-IOL is a non-profit organization that offers comprehensive interoperability and conformance-based testing through 16 technology-based consortiums. For more information, visit http://www.iol.unh.edu or http://www.moonv6.org/media.

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