IPv6

IPv6 appears to have found a new killer app: business continuity.

Qualcomm has released a low-power 802.11n radio chip designed for embedded machine-to-machine wireless communications for smart building and smart appliance applications.

Forget Mardi Gras. Brazil is hosting a party for techies only this week to encourage deployment of IPv6, the next-generation Internet Protocol.

A dozen of the world's largest Internet companies -- including Facebook, Google and Comcast -- have committed to June 6, 2012, as the start date for their production deployments of IPv6, an upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol.

There are a variety of new technologies advancing in 2012 that you should investigate, if you aren't already doing so, to give your small business a leg up on the competition. These recent technologies are beginning to be widely adopted and will continue to drive business forward.

If you're ready for a technical deep dive in a book, the Cisco Networking Technology Series provides that in its collection of volumes on topics that include Cisco firewalls, Cisco Unity Connection voice-messaging platform, Cisco Contact Center, IPv6 and more. Here's a quick review of the books published in this series by Cisco Press this year.

Comcast has begun the production rollout of its new IPv6 service, with 100 customers installed in San Francisco's East Bay in one week.

Cloudmark is among the first messaging vendors to tackle the vexing issues related to integrating large-scale e-mail services with the next-generation Internet Protocol called IPv6.

With the official exhaustion of IPv4 open-pool addresses in February, the long migration path to IPv6 has passed another important milestone. Since the IANA IPv6 worldwide deployment announcement in 1999, the issue has never been whether, but simply when IPv6 would become the core protocol for global Internet traffic.

By now, you’ve heard that ARIN has (more or less) run out of IPv4 addresses and the time has come for mass migration to IPv6. If you are a Windows shop, the good news is that Microsoft has been preparing for IPv6 for years and almost all of the latest Microsoft wares support it. Some, such as Windows Server 2008 R2, depend heavily on it for certain features.