According to engineers at Hurricane Electric and iNetcore, by mid September, 2011, the Internet registries are expected to run out of routable IP addresses to assign.

On the Seinfeld episode, “The Dealership,” Kramer takes a test drive. The salesman asks about gas and Kramer responds, “There’s still some overlap between the needle and the slash below the “E”…I’ve been in the slash many times. This is nothing. You’ll get used to it.”

We’ll be approaching “the slash” soon enough as addresses for users, hosts and devices will suddenly become a scarce resource. While 2012 apocalyptic visions aren’t expected, the problem remains serious. Migrating to IPv6 is the leading approach, with its much larger address space of a little more than 340 trillion addresses. IPv6 could also introduce a number of engineering headaches for enterprises and consumers.

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Source [ Network Computing ]