Couple of weeks ago I started a new initiative called “Names, Numbers and Beyond”.

I started this as I genuinely think we are facing big issues due to the uncontrolled and non-standard growth of the IP and Name space used today and tomorrow.

To keep in control and make everything manageable, parcelling out IP address space and the use of tight naming standards/policies is necessary to make networks work better and make them achievable.

This is not new, in the telephone era, phone-number standards, but also deployment and parcelling out networks accordingly were very common and faced similar issues. We should go back, review and learn from that.

With the upcoming use of IPv6 we probably want to architect the parcelling out of prefixes and addresses a bit more. Automate it of course, but keep everything into accordance with an industry standard.

Same for naming, we need to name those IP addresses. DNS has, like an IP Space, a very hierarchical based structure that lends itself very well to be deployed in a tight and very controlled way.

The question remains of course, “what standard”, this is the exact goal of this initiative to handle and come up with some pointers or even answers to get it going and form standards.

Part of this story is also the automation part, which is unmistakably tied into DDI. We need more enforcing tools to standardize and automate parcelling out of Name and IP space. What better tool to use than DDI?

So it’s a combination of standards, automation and the possibility to enforce it.

It is amazing we are still in the forming and storming phase after all the years using IP and DNS, but my idea is to get the minds together to make this fly or make people aware and spend some time on it.