New Data Center Strategies Newsletter, Network World, By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 09/26/06

Many organizations still approach IP address management as a somewhat secondary consideration. Since the basic tools are available for free on any platform, many companies will deploy DNS and DHCP servers on an ad-hoc basis with little or no central management, often without an organization-wide naming and addressing schema.

Surprisingly enough, in many organizations, IP address management still consists of a paper record or a spreadsheet. While these manual approaches might work for a domain containing a few dozen static hosts, they cannot cope with the two major trends in IP address management: rapid growth of the address space and the highly dynamic nature of transient, wireless and mobile devices.

For enterprises and service providers today, large IP address space and roaming/mobile users are not the exception; they are the norm. As a result, many organizations are struggling to keep up with antiquated IP address management practices.

As the IP address management space is transformed, the existing DNS and DHCP tools are still excellent choices for serving the addresses. In fact, a sophisticated IP address-management system can leverage tools like BIND to deliver DNS and DHCP services to local networks, while coordinating the IP address space across a complex multi-domain, multi-network and often multinational organization. What’s required are IP address-management tools that go way beyond the basic serving of DNS and DHCP, providing full lifecycle management for network-address capacity management, from the registrar all the way down to the DHCP response.

A comprehensive IP address-management system should take a holistic approach to address management. Beyond serving a single IP address to a host, it should offer the ability to manage the entire IP address space of an organization from a proactive capacity-planning perspective. Managing the IP space as a network resource allocation problem gives IT managers and CIOs a whole different perspective to address management. Instead of looking at the address-management problem as basic “housekeeping,” it becomes a powerful tool for security, capacity planning, availability and growth management. IP address management tools, supporting an address management practice, are as different from “just DNS” as corporate finance is from bookkeeping.

Many organizations are beginning to realize the IP address space is an asset to be managed like any other strategic asset in an organization. Moving beyond spreadsheets and primitive or homegrown tools then allows the transition from tactical “keep things going” mode to managing the network assets as a strategic resource, positioning the organization to easily integrate addressing schemes in mergers and acquisitions as well as to support future requirements such as IPv6.