IPAM

The 2012 edition of our IPv6 survey is now on-line! Breaking our former tri-ennial pattern, we're now going annual, since IPv6 deployment has certainly heated up! We conducting the survey over the next two weeks until May 4. The survey should only take 5-10 minutes to complete and for your trouble, you can enter your name and contact information to be entered into a drawing for a free Apple iPad. The survey is similar to last year's, which helps us look for trends, but also features a couple of new questions. One of particular interest asks about the "IPv6 density threshold" people may be waiting for to pull the trigger on deploying IPv6. This density threshold relates to the percentage of Internet users that are IPv6 within the entire Internet. It'd be interesting to see if this "IPv6 audience size" has an influence on people's planning initiatives. Thank you in advance for taking the time to complete this survey ! Results will be published in mid...

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which for all intents and purposes is the standards body of the Internet Protocol, has declared that "IPv6 is no longer considered optional." In RFC 6540 officially published late last week as an Internet Best Current Practice, the IETF cites the impending depletion of IPv4 address space with the continued growth of the Internet as drivers for widespread IPv6 deployment. While the RFC defines requirements for all developers of IP nodes, the main target seems to be consumer device vendors, many of whom have delayed implementation of IPv6. With consumers just implementing these IPv4-only devices today, they are likely to remain installed for many years, extending the IPv4 support lifecycle. Of course IPv4 will be around for quite some time, but the more of these devices that are IPv4+IPv6 instead of IPv4-only, the easier co-existence will be to manage. Among the best practices recommended, the RFC stipulates that all new "IP i...

I recently had the opportunity to preview a market analyst's brief on BT Diamond IP's DHCP/DNS/IPAM (DDI) features and benefits. Among my comments, I indicated that there was no mention of IPv4/IPv6 block management, a core IPAM function for which we are frankly unmatched. To my surprise, I was asked to elaborate about our block management features and benefits. From my perspective, for any modest sized or larger IP network, DDI starts with block management. If you have to manually type in every subnet address in your network, why not use a spreadsheet? Block management enables entry of a "root" block, such as 10.0.0.0/8, fc00::/7, 2001:db8:a87e::/48, etc. as the root block from which subnets or other "pool" blocks can be allocated. This allocation process should not require re-entry (or cut-and-paste) of a chosen subnet address; if yours does, you're little better off than using spreadsheets which likewise require manual entry. With the Diamond IP so...