Time to look at IP address management?

15 Aug 2012

As companies shift to IPv6 and virtual machines, they may need more effective ways to manage IP address allocation.

The transition to IPv6 addresses and data centre virtualisation are just two reasons that companies should take a closer look at IP address management (IPAM) software – especially those still allocating and managing IP addresses using spreadsheets.

This week, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise announced new updates to its IP address management solution VitalQIP that aim to help administrators “effortlessly” implement IPv6 addressing. With VitalQIP 8.0, the company claims, they need only enter a single IPv6 address into the system and all other IPv6 addresses required in their infrastructure can be provisioned by allocation algorithms.

“With IPv6 deployments now occurring in the enterprise space, customers need the tools to manage their vast IPv6 address allocations automatically,” said Brian Shorland, EMEA product manager at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. “Doing so manually via spreadsheets – as was often the case with IPv4 address management – is simply not viable in an IPv6 addressing environment.” Network administrators will need IPv6 migration strategies in place as IPv4 ‘address exhaustion’ continues globally, he added, and effective IPAM should be one of the first stages of any such strategy.

Meanwhile, another IPAM vendor, Infoblox was trumpeting the results of an assessment of its products by independent technology product evaluator, Tolly Group, which concluded that these offer labour savings of up to 300% in VMware virtualised networks.

The Tolly report states: “Manual IP address and DNS provisioning of a large number of VMs is not practical since it is prone to error, time intensive, costly and is simply not scalable.”

It found that these labour savings are achieved when IPAM is used to automate these functions, including assignment of an IP address to a virtual machine (VM); creating or deleting a collection of VMs; gathering information about the VMs; and provisioning a new physical server to host VMs. “Continuing to rely on manual tools and processes for these functions can jeopardise an IT enterprise organisations’ virtual network scalability and flexibility.

The company’s analysis of Infoblox found that it can address these issues by providing a 50 percent reduction in VM deployment time for network provisioning and connectivity; troubleshooting and inventory-management advantages, via built-in discovery tools that give admins VM system and network data; and a significant reduction in human-related errors. It also claims a potential ROI from using Infoblox of between $60,000 and $600,000 per year, depending on the number of VMs in the environment.

According to founder Kevin Tolly, “The Infoblox IP address management solution fills the gap between server automation tools and network automation requirements to enable faster deployment of cloud environments and better overall IT and business agility.”

However, the IPAM market may be heading for a shake-up when Microsoft launches Windows Server 2012 later this year. The company has already revealed that the latest version of its server operating system will come with built-in IPAM, an entirely new feature. Windows Server 2012 is set for launch on 4 September.