Crunching the numbers

Will McGregor isn't an accountant, but still his job requires that he keep tabs on 20,000 numbers at once.

As a LAN network and security team member for Reuters in London, the numbers McGregor monitors are IP addresses, which represent more than 10,000 servers and network devices. According to McGregor, if the numbers don't match, customers simply don't get the IP services or applications they've requested from the media giant's network.

"You can't have any IP address conflicts because the IP services will eventually stop working. The routers won't know where to pass the packets to next, and that would be a complete disaster," he says. "IP address management is absolutely critical, and it just keeps getting more complex."

IP address management, the practice of maintaining an up-to-date repository of all IP addresses within any given network, historically has involved manual inventories and Excel-like spreadsheets that could be updated when new devices were added. But, according to Forrester Research, 25% of companies surveyed have moved beyond those rudimentary methods to internally developed apps. Another 20% use third-party tools to ease IP address management.

Several factors are driving IP address management from the back burner to a more prominent place on the IT to-do list.

• Data center consolidation is sending more LAN applications over the Internet, which is driving efforts to better manage IP addresses within IT shops.
• VoIP, by making phones an IP device, potentially doubles the number of IP addresses.
• Security concerns in terms of network access and potential virus infection from unknown devices are forcing companies to better manage network access.
• The demand to deliver QoS and applications to end users is pushing IT managers to more closely monitor IP addresses.

"We used to have lots of disparate networks, subnets, small groups of servers, and it wasn't organized, but now we're centrally managing it all at this data center," McGregor says. "It's a much more complex map of what is there and what needs to talk to each other, to the Internet and to servers on the other side of the Internet."

A number of vendors, including Cisco, Incognito, INS, Lucent, MetaInfo, Nominum, Nortel and ApplianSys, are shipping tools to help network managers maintain an inventory of the IP addresses in their network, subnets, virtual LANs and more. Using either software installed on a server or bundled on an appliance, IP address management products are designed to keep an up-to-date inventory of the network addresses in use. Some products simply serve as a repository for data that must be manually updated by network engineers, while other products claim to dynamically discover new devices, collect IP address information from them and ensure there is no duplication.

"The evolution and adoption of IP address management processes and tools has taken much longer than one would expect," says Thomas Mendel, a principal analyst with Forrester. "There will be a significant uptake in this area in 2005 and 2006 because IT managers have to continue to deliver services as the number of addresses escalates. Products can help."