The word is out and it is official – Internet is going to fall short of IPv4 addresses in the next 500 days or odd. Computer experts and Industry leaders had expressed their warnings earlier but it seems they either fell on deaf ears or the IT Industry did not anticipate that the short fall would happen so early. What does this have in store for the IT Industry? Well, it clearly means that each device – every server, mobile phones, router or for that matter, everything else that makes up the Internet or uses the Internet will need to be reconfigured or upgraded. The upgrade will include a switch to IP Version 6 (IPv6) instead of the prevailing IP Version 4 (IPv4) which is now more than 20 years old. Here is a small explanation of the technicality involved that may help to understand for those who are non-technical.

What is an IP Address?

The Internet works on a transport system, commonly known as TCP/IP protocol, to transfer and exchange data. TCP stands for Transfer Control Protocol and IP stands for Internet Protocol. Both together make the TCP/IP protocol stack. An IP Address is basically an identifier for a computer or a device on a TCP/IP network. When one computer or device transfers or exchanges data to another, it uses the IP address of the destination. The transmitting computer or device is called the Source while the receiving one is called the Destination.

The format of the IP address that we currently use is a 32-bit numeric address written as four (4) numbers seperated by periods. For example, 192.168.4.2 is an IP Address. Each device or a computer connected directly to the Internet has to have a unqiue IP address. No two devices can use the same IP address as this would cause a conflict and the Source would not know which Destination to send the data to. Similary a Destination would not be able to identify which Source to report back to that the data has been received if there is an IP address conflict. Currently, the IP address range, ie. IP Version 4 or IPv4, is being classified in to 3 main classes: Class A, Class B and Class C. There are other classes too, but they are restricted. The art of this classification is called Subnetting which is further enhanced by Supernetting. Since explaining this involves lot of technical understanding of the TCP/IP Protocol Stack, we shall skip it for now. For those interested to know further, there is always Google at your help.

How does an IP work?

There is no better way to understand this but with an example. Let’s take the example of my website www.vishalvasu.com. My website is associated with an IP address since it works on the TCP/IP protocol. The IP address of my website is:

74.53.251.150

The above format is called a dotted decimal format which makes it easier for humans to remember. But we all know by now that computers and related devices communicate in a binary format. The same IP address to a computer or a device on the Internet would mean something like this:

01001010.00110101.11111011.10010110

The four numbers in an IP address are called octets, because they each have eight positions when viewed in binary form. If you add all the positions together, you get 32, which is why IPv4 addresses are considered 32-bit numbers. Since each of the eight positions can have two different states (1 or 0) the total number of possible combinations per octet is 2^8 or 256. So each octet can contain any value between 0 and 255. Combine the four octets and you get 2^32 or a possible 4,294,967,296 unique values.

Out of the almost 4.3 billion possible combinations, certain values are restricted from use as typical IP addresses. For example, the IP address 0.0.0.0 is reserved for the default network and the address 255.255.255.255 is used for broadcasts.

Ok, comming back to the example, imagine if people had to remember the IP address of 74.53.251.150 to browse www.vishalvasu.com. Complicated? That’s just one site and imagine if one had to remember sites like hotmail.com, yahoo.com, google.com, microsoft.com, ebay.com, etc. in similar fashion. The thought itself is boring. To make things simpler, the TCP/IP protocol uses a system called DNS (Domain Name System). The basic role of a DNS is to map text names to an IP Address automatically. This way, one only needs to remember www.vishalvasu.com instead of 74.53.251.150. Even though it is totally invisible, DNS servers handle billions of requests every day and they are essential to the Internet’s smooth functioning.

What Next?

IPv4 offers approximately 4.3 billion possible combinations of IP addresses which can used on the TCP/IP network. This is a limit which is feared to get exhausted by 2012 or probably even before that. This fear also led to lot of discussions, research and debates among Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) since 1980’s. Finally, sometime in 1998, the announcement of IP Version 6 (IPv6) was made. IPv6 fixes a number of problems in IPv4, such as the limited number of available IPv4 addresses. It also adds many improvements to IPv4 in areas such as routing and network autoconfiguration.

IPv6 is expected to gradually replace IPv4, with the two coexisting for a number of years during a transition period. Basically, the address size was increased from 32 bit to 128 bit, which is deemed sufficient for the foreseeable future.

The day finally came and the website of Vanche Gujarat was launched successfully today by the Hon. Chief Minister of Gujarat, Shri Narendra Modi. In his speech after launching the website, Hon. CM cracked a joke that as such doing any event on the 1st day of April is risky business, but he somehow likes to take the risks head-on. Applause!

Vanche Gujarat is one of the programs outlined as part of the Swarnim Gujarat celebrations which focuses on promoting and fostering the culture of general reading across the state of Gujarat. I think this initiative will allow Gujarat to give lot of intellects to the service of the nation in the near future.

For this, the government will actively rope in private and government libraries, students of schools and colleges and voluntary organisations. Around 15,000 granth yatras, 2,500 reading workshops and 1,000 interactive sessions – on the theme ”the book they liked most” – would also be organised.

The website has been developed by us and I wish it shall pass on the message to fellow Indians and hopefully this initiative will not remain confined to the borders of Gujarat.

Yesterday was a big day for me and my team as there was a scheduled launch of the new Vibrant Gujarat Web Portal aimed at the upcoming Vibrant Gujarat 2011 Summit. The web portal was successfully launched by Shri Saurabh Patel (Hon. Minister of State, Gujarat).

The fifth edition of biennial global investors’ summit slated for January 2011, which is being tagged as ‘Davos in Action’, will focus more on branding the state of Gujarat as a business hub where deals are done, rather than just an investment destination. In a gradual deviation from previous events, the upcoming summit has been renamed as ‘Vibrant Gujarat 2011: The Global Business Hub’ instead of ‘Vibrant Gujarat Global Investors’ Summit’.

Remote Infrastructure Management (RIM) services will be the next growth engine for the offshore service industry as reported by leading consulting agencies and media. In fact, the global RIM industry has grown at more than 80 per cent CAGR from US$2 billion in 2006 to US$6 billion to US$7 billion in 2008 where India has been a significant beneficiary. A common question that would come to our mind is – with the industry hit by recession in 2009 and with the dark clouds of recession still looming on the horizon of 2010, what potential does the RIM service market hold in the future?

If studied closely, RIM makes more sense not in terms of a measure to cut costs during recessions but more as a business sense. How? Let’s see.

Today enterprises leverage the power of IT to streamline their key business processes and gain a competitive advantage. Even with the investments already made, the key issues relating to application performance, scalability, security, management and effective utilization are mostly unresolved. Apart from helping to reduce the overall IT Infrastructure Management costs, a well structured and managed RIM relationship can bring significant benefits.

Flexibility of Service
Customers hiring service providers have an advantage here as they can align the business needs with the services provided by the Service Provider. Services can be flexed to meet peak times and loads, mission-critical and non-mission critical or a combination of both. This type of flexible pricing model and service delivery helps in apportioning the infrastructure management costs.

Domain Expertise
In this highly volatile IT industry it is hard to keep up with the latest technology trends and it is almost impossible to have on pay roll a staff that can match the ever demanding and changing face of IT technology across all segments. A RIM service provider can add value here as they have diverse IT staffs which are at a client’s disposal, working 24×7. Moreover, these specialists are constantly updated with the latest technology trends via internal training programs, technical training programs from vendors, etc.

This basically helps companies to gain a competitive advantage as it helps to reduce the time to market. Companies can take the bold steps of adopting and switching to new technologies to gain a competitive advantage. Serious service providers in the RIM industry would normally have alliances in place with leading technology suppliers and as a result clients can also enjoy a single window of service from them with an assurance that the team working on their projects would be capable of handling the technology and related needs.

Visibility and Control
Companies retain full control of its strategic components such as physical IT assets, technology refresh, policy and architecture which provides visibility into the availability, performance and utilization of each component. Many of the established RIM suppliers have embraced the ITIL framework which lends itself to RIM very effectively. Putting the collected data in to this type of best practices framework provides lot of insight and visibility. This visibility further enables companies to take control of the situation, make informed decisions on future investments in IT and improve current service levels.

Reduced Costs
Remote Infrastructure Management not only assists in reducing the manpower cost of managing the infrastructure, but also brings down the costs related to future infrastructure investments. It has been reported and endorsed by agencies like McKinsey and NASSCOM that outsourcing the infrastructure management services can save dramatically reduce the labour related costs by 30% to 40%. On the other hand, companies can also reduce costs associated with future infrastructure investments using expertise of the service provider by way of infrastructure optimization, standardization using industry best practises and consolidation using virtualization technologies.

Proactive Services
Most of the time RIM services engagements are driven and governed by SLA’s (Service Level Agreements). Service providers, in order to maintain the SLA, invest in to software and technology that enable them to gain an insight on failing components in the IT infrastructure, usage patterns, thresholds, etc. These tools enable a service provider to provide 24×7 proactive monitoring and management via a Remote NOC (Network Operations Centre). This helps to resolve issues in a faster and structured manner.

So, in today’s fast paced and ever changing IT world, RIMs makes more business sense and CIOs have to step back and ask themselves what they’re trying to accomplish with infrastructure outsourcing. Cost savings, optimization, transformation or efficiency? CIO’s decisions on outsourcing infrastructure management are going to be driven by more than just cost savings and as a result it is also going to create a challenge for the service providers to tweak their service models to show more benefits and not only cost savings.