When your company's IP address list begins to rival the Manhattan phone book, it's time for a serious IP address management tool. Dealing with a growing and rapidly changing population of IP addresses is a tedious and dismal chore, especially if you're assigning client addresses with the old-fashioned static IP address approach, using a spreadsheet or piece of paper, or if you're manually juggling multiple Domain Name Server and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol servers to track and lease addresses.

DNS and DHCP services included with Windows Server 2000 or 2003 are an option, but you might need better performance (quicker DHCP IP address lease responses and DNS name resolutions than Windows delivers) or higher security. For example, Windows DNS services don't support encrypted zone transfer and update features like most non-Windows DNS server products do.

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Appliance factor
How we did it

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We invited several IP address management tools to our Alabama lab for testing. MetaInfo (Meta IP Enterprise 5.6 and SA-500 DNS/DHCP appliance), ApplianSys (DNSBox 300 and DNSBox 100) and Lucent (VitalQIP 6.1 with Service Pack 1) accepted our invitations. Other vendors declined to have their products evaluated (see How we did it, below).

Our tests aimed to find a tool that could flexibly and efficiently assign IP addresses to all our IP devices, centrally manage all the address information across a corporation, quickly and effortlessly equate host names with IP addresses, scale well, be intuitive to use and be pervasively platform-neutral. The tool also should have useful reports and integrate with custom-written applications, cooperate with Active Directory, be Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)-aware and robustly deal with badly formed or non-compliant DHCP requests. The system also needed to be highly fault-tolerant and enforce security to help keep hackers at bay.

Lucent's VitalQIP wins our Clear Choice Award, but just by a whisker. VitalQIP gave us fast performance, scalability, feature-rich options for dealing with IP addresses and an intuitive user interface. The software is an enterprise-ready tool to organize and manage virtually any set of IP addresses, no matter how large or complex. MetaInfo's Meta IP Enterprise has excellent security and reporting features, while ApplianSys' DNSBox units are easily installed plug-and-play DNS/DHCP appliances.

IP Management 101

We were highly impressed with VitalQIP's ability to discover, manage and administer a complete picture of IP addresses across an entire corporate infrastructure, including all the DNS, BOOTP and DHCP servers across all networks and subnets. VitalQIP maintained a device profile for every IP address and accurately tracked the status of each address - such as used, unused, reserved, pending a move or available.

VitalQIP includes an enterprise server, remote server, Web client interface, GUI client and distributed services. It works with either a Sybase or Oracle relational database to store the IP address data, configuration settings and event data. Lucent bundles Sybase Adaptive Server with VitalQIP.