Speaker
Description
The driver for phasing out IPv4 in the Nordic Tier-1 site (NT1, aka NDGF-T1) sooner rather than later is that we forsee a significant risk of running out of IPv4 addresses when scaling storage servers horizontally in order to handle the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) data rates. We expect to have a data rate of 10-20 times when HL-LHC comes online in 2030, and the most cost-effective way to serve this is to have a larger number storage servers than today. And in order to prove that we are ready for HL-LHC data taking in 2030, it would be good to finish the bulk of the phase-out of IPv4 by Data Challenge 2027
This move comes with lots of constraints though. Since it is only "almost all" services that understand IPv6 today, we cannot completely shut IPv4 down without considerations on how the legacy systems can access data. There might also be unknown dependencies on IPv4 in access or management of services, that we will only detect in testing or production. Individual scientists might want to access the data outside of the grid, for instance from their own laptop which might not have IPv6 yet. There are even reasons that the physics experiments might want to run legacy software for reproducibility, some of it too old for IPv6 support.
Together this indicates a phased approach, and this presentation will talk about the current progress and the remaining plans, the tradeoffs we have had to make, and the progress towards the end goal of IPv6 only.