“6connect quickly solved our network automation challenges by automating the entire provisioning and management process, for both IPv4 and IPv6. Being able to allocate addressing to different locations and purposes made it easy to foster good aggregation and DNS integration saved tons of deployment time that otherwise would have been spent on time consuming work.”
Brandon Ross, Engineering Lead, Interop
Challenge
Interop has a vast assignment of address space, not only do we have 45.0.0.0/15, but a number of smaller blocks and, of course, a number of IPv6 blocks as well. Our network has to be deployed extremely quickly, in most cases we have less than a week to build a network to support 10’s of thousands of attendees, not to mention the exhibitors, classes and administrative functions of the show. In the past we had not managed our addressing well, having used mostly spreadsheets for documentation. This already accounted for frustrating problems in IPv4; once we seriously started managing IPv6 resources the problem grew exponentially. One lesson we all learned about working with IPv6 is not to try to manage addressing manually, it’s too easy to make typos and we often had to depend on a single person to manage the spreadsheet since it was too easy to make a mistake.
Benefit
The addition of the 6connect IPAM system allowed us to make it easy for any of the InteropNet team to assign addresses for themselves. Instead of having to funnel all IP requests through a single engineer, now anyone on the team that needed an address or network block could log in and request one. On top of that, 6connect’s integration with DNS meant that hostnames would now be pushed automatically instead of having to be manually entered. The audit features added additional value, allowing us to see at a glance how we were utilizing the address space.
Solution
6connect quickly solved our IPAM challenges by automating the entire process, for both IPv4 and IPv6. Being able to allocate addressing to different locations and purposes made it easy to foster good aggregation and DNS integration saved tons of deployment time that otherwise would have been spent on time consuming work.
About 6connect
6connect was founded in Silicon Valley by Aaron Hughes and Pete Sclafani in 2009 to solve the increasing complexity of provisioning and managing networks driven by the onset of IPv6, DNSSEC, virtualization and distributed global data centers.
6connect’s SaaS solutions provision, manage and discover IPv6 and IPv4 addresses, DNS/DNSSEC zones, DHCP pools, and networked or virtual assets for service providers and enterprises. Our policy-based, one-click provisioning, discovery and asset management software unifies and automates critical network and virtual asset workflows that underpin cloud infrastructure stability. The 6connect platform is available as a highly scalable cloud or on-premise solution, and saves significant amounts of the time normally spent on these tasks.
6connect’s professional services managed team has over a decade of experience implementing IPv6 networks. Contact us to learn about our cloud-based solutions.
+1 (650) 646-2206
