Why Speaking Gibberish Is Your Passport to an IPv6 World

We’ve known for some time using technologies like Infoblox, that a dedicated IP Address Management (IPAM) solution will automate away 2 ½ man-days a month of administrative faffing for the average 1,000 user/5,000 IP address organisation.  At that scale of business in particular, it’s not just the threat of wasted time and resources that drives the purchasing decision.  With the alternative fix for IPAM typically being a dangerously unstable home-made spreadsheet based system of arcane checks and balances, there is no room to hide when the document goes awry or when some critical network outage requires rapid intervention. 

Those rules-of-thumb are true enough when grappling with DNS and DHCP infrastructure systems in an IPv4 world, but become even more compelling with the snowballing adoption of the much longer and more complicated IPv6 addressing system.  Put simply, IPv6 is not a human-friendly address system.  Whereas IPv4 is a comparatively short chain of numbers (e.g. 192.101.20.5), IPv6 by contrast is a morass of tightly bunched gibberish (something more akin to: 1966:ajhd:df7w:98gh:a123:p2ps:mwh2:6t2q).  Then there is the issue of requiring three to four IPv6 addresses per IPv6 interface.  Stick that in your spreadsheet and I defy you to get to the end of the week without your head blowing off. 

If a customer hasn’t considered IPAM automation before, then IPv6 should be a catalyst for exploring the business case for it.  If they decided against it in the past, then consider how the new challenges of navigating IPv6 jiggery-pokery is bound to make the ROI model stronger and even more compelling.