Japanese ICT giant Fujitsu announced a solution it says can help data centers transition from IPv4 to IPv6 smoothly by enabling tens of thousands of devices to share one IPv4 address, pushing all of this traffic over an IPv6 network.

If it works the way Fujitsu says, the technology gives data center operators some breathing room as they upgrade their systems to be compatible with IPv6, taking the pressure of a looming depletion of IPv4 addresses off.

Vint Cerf, reportedly one of the Internet’s creators, said in a Google-produced video that the network’s founding fathers, through IPv4, only allocated enough address space for 4.3bn devices. The number of IP-enabled devices in the world is quickly approaching that limit.

“We are now absolutely compelled to implement the new one so we can continue to grow the network,” Cerf said.

Fujitsu’s solution is called SA46T (stateless automatic IPv4 over IPv6 tunneling). It essentially enables the creation of 4.3bn networks, each with its own IPv4 address.

Traffic on these networks, however, is “tunneled” on an IPv6 network. Each IPv4 network can accommodate 65,000 machines (physical or virtual).

This means all existing IPv4-based servers can be connected as new IPv4- or IPv6-based servers are added.

Earlier this month, on June 6, 65 network operators and thousands of websites turned on IPv6-enabled systems on what was called World IPv6 Day. This was a concerted effort to speed up the world’s transition onto the new Internet addressing system.

By providing 128 bits of address space – instead of 32 bits comprising an IPv4 address – IPv6 takes the number of possible addresses from 4.3bn to 3.4 x 10³Ôü©, or 340 trillion-trillion-trillion.