What is IPAM? It’s crucial for managing IP addresses
If you’re asking “What is IPAM,” here you go: IP address management (IPAM) is a method for planning, tracking, and managing IP address space on a network. IP, which stands for Internet Protocol, is how devices on a network communicate with each other.
IP addressing is a logical means of assigning addresses to devices on an IP network. Each device connected to a network requires a unique IP address.
Managing tens of thousands of IP addresses for large enterprise networks can quickly get complicated. It’s assigning IP addresses to devices, yes. But it’s also changing them, deleting them when devices leave the network, dealing with potential address conflicts, setting up subnets, and designating addresses for use by certain applications or clouds.
IPAM is a method to bring organization to what would otherwise be IP chaos.
In this glossary entry, we’ll define IPAM and then take a deeper look at the benefits of IPAM software tools. Furthermore, we’ll look at how it can integrate with DNS and DHCP.
What is IPAM?
First, some networking basics
IP (version 4) addresses are 32-bit integers that can be expressed in hexadecimal notation. The more common format, known as dotted quad or dotted decimal, is x.x.x.x, where each x can be any value between 0 and 255. For example, 192.0.2.146 is a valid IPv4 address.
While IPv4 still routes most of today’s internet traffic, we’ve run out of address space. As a result, the internet is undergoing a gradual transition to IPv6. This latest version of IP is a 128-bit address space, with both letters and numbers expressed in hexadecimal format (for example, 2002:db8::8a3f:362:7897).