By Richard Hyatt, Chief Technology Officer – BlueCat Networks Inc.

Born in the sixties, shaped in the seventies, rose to stardom in the nineties …

Does this sound like the biography of a mid-life actor or rock star? Perhaps so, but it also describes the brief history of our aging Internet Protocol.

The roots of IP trace back to a 1960s U.S. Department of Defense research project called APRANET. DoD engineers sought to develop an open protocol that would allow interoperability between different computer networks. The protocol was redefined in the 1970s and formally named the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or simply TCP/IP. In the early 1990s, commercial interests saw the potential of the fledging network (now known as the Internet) and with new service providers enabling new business models, the number of connected systems quickly grew from a few thousand to tens of millions over the decade.

Today’s Networks
Unlike many of yesterday’s faded celebrities, the Internet is more popular than ever. It has become the medium of choice for modern networks and a standard fixture in virtually every organization and home. Internet growth continues unabated, as an ever-increasing number of endpoint devices require network connectivity. VoIP handsets, mobile computers, virtual machines, RFID tags and IPv6 are some of the new technologies driving demand for IP networking and IP address consumption.

In fact, the rampant growth in network-attached devices is rapidly consuming the available supply of IP addresses. With nearly 85% of addresses already in use, experts predict we will run out of public IPv4 address space by 2011. Not surprisingly, governments around the world are mandating that public and private sector organizations adopt and transition to IP version 6 (IPv6) in order to facilitate future growth and to prevent IP exhaustion.

While unquestionably larger, today’s IP networks are required to deliver a much higher quality of service that those of ten years ago. ‘Always-on/always accessible’ network infrastructures are expected to distribute bandwidth-greedy services with ‘dial tone-like’ reliability. Network downtime invariably results in business disruption, which can get very expensive quickly.

As the size and complexity of IP networks increase, the planning, allocating and tracking of IP addresses becomes increasingly difficult. An inaccurate inventory of deployed IP addresses can be a real obstacle for those charged with keeping networks up and running.

In fact, all of these conditions – the increasing numbers and types of network-attached devices, the dwindling supply of available IP addresses, the impending transition from IPv4 to IPv6, and the need for 7/24 corporate networks – make IP address management or ‘IPAM’ a growing challenge for many organizations. When you consider the complexity of today’s networks, management of these IP addresses falls well beyond the capability of static spreadsheets. Organizations are now dealing with network centric data residing with the DNS/DHCP database and IP centric data associated not only with the device MAC address but now includes user defined fields: employee number possessing the laptop, asset tag of the device, lease expiry information for evergreen programs, etc. Reconciling and synchronizing these pools of data is not for the faint of heart as error prone spreadsheets no longer meet the requirement of providing information of IP usage, visibility and predictability.

Fortunately, we are witnessing the introduction of new, intelligent IPAM solutions offering new capabilities to address modern day network challenges. These scalable solutions empower administrators to manage network growth more effectively and provide more consistent quality of network service without incurring additional head count.

IPAM Re-Defined
At its most basic level, IPAM is not a new concept. For over a decade, organizations

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