KEYNOTE: The Nine Lives of an Early Adopter: Leading Cats to Water in the IPv6 Era#

Nick Burlagio (Planning and Architecture) and Inder Monga (Executive Director), ESnet

• Why: ESnet is one of the few production networks that has actually gone IPv6-only on its management plane (with the ESnet6 buildout, completed 2022), and this keynote frames the "why now" argument in terms directly relevant to cloud-native and agentic workloads. It is a rare operator talk where the transition strategy, not the nostalgia, is the payload.
• What: A history-to-present narrative of ESnet's IPv6 journey — 6Bone participant, 6REN founder, recipient of the first production IPv6 allocation from ARIN in 1999 — culminating in ESnet6, which runs an IPv6-only management plane with comprehensive automation and visibility. The forward-looking argument: AI agents on the network need simplicity (elimination of middleboxes), one consistent addressing scheme for end-to-end automation, and any-to-any hyper-connectivity — none of which survive NAT and dual-stack sprawl.
• How: Primarily a strategy and lessons talk rather than a mechanism talk (the deck walks the 1995–2026 timeline of IPv6 touchpoints). The concrete operational takeaway is the IPv6-only management plane as proof that a large WAN can run single-stack for infrastructure traffic even while carrying dual-stack customer traffic.
• Where applicable: ESnet-scale (DOE national labs, 100G/400G backbone) is specific, but the management-plane-first pattern is broadly transferable — it's the least risky place to go v6-only and it forces the tooling/automation to become v6-native. The agentic-workload argument is relevant to anyone planning for machine-dense networks.