Speaking on Tuesday to the Brocade Technology Day Summit on the company's campus in San Jose, California, Director of Product Management Keith Stewart said many Brocade customers are grappling with the issue of IP (Internet Protocol) address migration.

"As organizations embarked upon that journey, we found many felt that there was a lack of a pragmatic point of view on how to manage that transition. The market was dominated by conversations at opposite ends of the spectrum," Stewart said.

IPv4, the addressing scheme used in most of the Internet today, is limited to about 4.3 billion unique Internet addresses, and most of those have already been assigned. PCs, servers, phones and other devices that use the Internet need an IP address to communicate, and soon they may only be able to get addresses from the next-generation protocol, IPv6. The announcement in February that the global Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) had placed this fact in sharp relief. However, reaction to the trend has come down on two extremes, according to Stewart.

The "IPv4 diehards" think that the current addressing scheme can be extended forever through NAT (network address translation) and there is no economic incentive to move to IPv6, he said. The "IPv6 purists" believe all organizations should move to the new protocol in the next 18 months. "That's simply not economically viable," Stewart said. It's also not realistic to think NAT will take care of all the IPv6-only client devices that enterprises will want to reach in the coming years, he said.

"We believe that exhaustion is real, but that most organizations have time to plan and execute their strategies," Stewart said. And administrators should get ready for a long transition, broken into several stages. "A two-protocol world is the world in which we will live for the next decade," Stewart said.