The company sees an opportunity to create an IT infrastructure that will be “a platform for future innovation,” he says. “This is a technology that can transform the way we do business.”

Wettling says Bechtel sees IPv6 as an enabling technology, as the Web was in the 1990s. For example, the company is exploring how IPv6 will help with wireless sensor networks to help track logistics, and with mobile ad hoc networks that can be set up quickly at the start of a project.

Bechtel’s IT group tried to minimize the problems and costs associated with a broad technology change by using a planned, gradual approach spanning several years. This included sending 3 dozen people to an “IPv6 boot camp” run by Native6 (now part of Command Information, a provider of IPv6 training and services) and creating an IPv6 lab to perform distributed configurations and testing without putting Bechtel’s production network at risk.

“We set up small IPv6 labs at four locations, each with a few servers, routers, switches, and put them in isolated networks within each office and interconnected them across the Internet,” Wettling says.

By the end of 2006, Bechtel had enabled IPv6 on the production networks and hundreds of computers at four of its primary sites, and created a scalable model for future deployments.

The company instructed all its application developers on how to configure machines for IPv6. Today, Bechtel has more than 9,000 computers (desktops, portables and servers) in 70 cities worldwide running IPv6. The majority of its offices support IPv6, and the company is turning on other offices one at a time.

Hardware Hiccups
What challenges did Bechtel encounter on its road to IPv6? While most of the applications weren’t affected by the change in IP version, several presented problems. First, some databases weren’t set up with big enough fields to accommodate IPv6 addresses and had to be expanded.

Also, not all commercial or internally developed applications have the needed IPv6 attributes in them. Some of Bechtel’s monitoring and configuration software had to be tweaked to display IPv6 data.

“Not all products out there [such as Windows XP] have the IPv6 features we want,” Wettling adds. “XP doesn’t fully support IPv6 as well as [Microsoft’s] Vista does.” Bechtel will start deploying Vista later this year, he says.

For these reasons and others, aeronautics manufacturer Lockheed Martin figures its move to IPv6 will be a huge undertaking. “The transition to IPv6 will require a greater effort than the Y2K bug,” says Frank Cuccias, director of Lockheed’s IPv6 Center of Excellence. “Remember that Y2K only affected a subset of systems; IPv6 will affect almost all current systems.”