Fujitsu, BT Team on IP Address Management
Fujitsu is rolling out an IP address management service as part of a deal with British carrier BT aimed at corralling the proliferation of addresses needed for ubiquitous mobile devices connecting to IP-based networks.
The partners said Thursday (February 12) the new "IP Address Management-as-a-Service" offering combines BT's Diamond IP service with Fujitsu's Trust Public S5 platform integrated into its cloud infrastructure-as-a-service. The combined services are being positioned as an IP address management service for the emerging Internet of Things, the partners said.
The combined service is intended to help enterprises manage the exponential growth of IP addresses as a way to controlling operating expenses. The service also is being offered on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Fujitsu said it would also use BT's IP address management service to offer an expanded offering aimed at providing centralized control of IP address space along with DNS and DHCP servers. The partners are touting the approach as a way to ensure that an enterprise's inventory of assignable IP address remains current while reducing the chance of duplicate addresses, user errors and version control problems.
The need for IP address management services is being driven a proliferation of smartphones and other mobile devices that rely on IP-based networks, stressed Will Geoghegan, cloud architect overseeing the Trusted Public S5 Cloud effort at Fujitsu America Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif.
"As Internet users continue tracking exponential growth projections and deployments of Internet of Things applications, customers face a growing need for more dynamic address management," Michael Dooley, vice president of software solutions at BT, added in a statement.
The IP address management service will be offered through Fujitsu to its new and existing customers in North America, the company said.
The partners join a crowded market to provide IP address managers. Big networking specialists like Cisco Systems offer similar services as do IT management specialists like Solar Winds. Most offerings are designed to automatically discover IP address infrastructure servers on customers' networks. They are then managed from a central interface.
Along with address space management, these services can also handle virtual IP address space management via a central virtual machine manager. For example, IP management services were added to the R2 version of the Windows Server 2012.
Meanwhile, other vendors have offered IP address manager plug-ins for platforms such as VMware's vCenter Orchestrator as a way to automate the process of obtaining an IP address in a virtual environment.
The emergence of IP address management-as-a-service corresponds with initiatives to implement new infrastructure orchestration and management services via the cloud. Companies like Fujitsu, Cisco and others also are betting that the emergence of the IoT will drive requirements to manage older IPv4 and current IPv6 protocols along with DNS and DHCP servers.
