The constant development of new added-value services offered by operators needs the definition of a strategy of IP addressing management associated to these services—VOIP, MPLS, NGN.

SOLIDserver™ is a unique market solution providing built-in functionalities allowing registration, provisioning, planning and management of the full life-cycle of IP addressing and naming services for operators’ networks. EfficientIP's solutions manage the global life cycle management of the IP addressing plans and DNS & DHCP services. These solutions offer the ability to quickly deploy new services whilst creating robust architectures.

SOLIDserver™ brings solutions for:

• Optimizing the consumption of IP resources (addresses, subnets, blocks)
• Modeling, standardizing and automating administrative procedures
• Simplifying the delegation of resource deployment with collaborative work tools

The operational benefits are as follows:

• Speed of services deployment: reduction of the "Time to market"
• Reduction in the functioning costs
• Business and IT alignment.

Modeling Complex Addressing Plan Designs

SOLIDserver™ enables the modeling of multiple IP addressing plans depending on the Network Providers’ organization, such as for instance services (VRF, MPLS, IP-VPN, BGP AS, circuits, network peering, NOC's loopbacks), geographic zones (points of presence location) or entities (subsidiaries, customers).

It is possible to mix and match models to build a tailor-made address structure. There is no limitation on the number of levels and depth of the IP plan that can be defined. All branches of this tailor-made tree structure can be independent or not. The flexibility and scalability of hierarchical tree structures certify easiness of modifications. It is possible to quickly reorganize, extend or migrate IP addressing plans according to network evolutions and company restructuration.

Each part of the addressing plan can have its own IPAM rules of resource consumption, documentation and its own methods of organization. Based on this unique approach it is possible to apply your IPAM policies on top of the IP addressing plan to streamline IP consumption and qualification.

IPAM Provisioning Process Modeling and Automation

A service provider’s business services delivery rely on his IP addressing plan which is the foundation of the service deployment. As a consequence IPAM processes are at the heart of the business delivery and have to be managed not only from a technical perspective but also from a business perspective:

• Faster business services deployment
• Cut costs and increase productivity at the same time
• Increase global service level agreement and customer satisfaction by eliminating errors
• IPAM is the reflection of the company organization

SOLIDserver™ allows you to model and automate all IPAM provisioning processes in a methodic and accurate way. SOLIDserver™ applies user-defined IPAM provisioning policies to consistently select the appropriate IP resources at the appropriate place within your IP plan organization, in concordance with your best practices, rules and constraints (naming convention, automatic choice of label, address or subnet mask). This frees administrators from the headaches of searching for available IPs to provision and helps them to manage the complexity of engineering rules enforcement.

SOLIDserver™ helps you improve your business agility and capacity utilization, shrinks provisioning time, and improves administrator productivity.

Streamline IP addressing plan Documentation

Daily network operations require deployments of IPAM resources which are both rapid and coherent. SOLIDserver™ enables you to create graphically unlimited numbers of fully customized templates of forms for IP objects. Each IP object template, named "Class", can have a specific list of user-defined fields of Meta Data such as device location, Circuit Number, Line Speed, serial number or whatever is important to be qualified by the user according to the company's needs. Thus it is possible to create dedicated Classes for specific network objects for the deployment of routers, servers, agency subnets or external DNS zones.

Classes are a simple tool designed to guarantee consistency and efficiency of the IP qualification by:

• Streamlining data qualification
• Eliminating all configuration and qualification errors
• Guiding system administrators
• Ensuring consistency in deployment

IP Space Fragmentation Control and Management

SOLIDserver™ ensures a maximum optimization of subnet consumption for optimal summarization. SOLIDserver™ identifies available subnets, according to required user-defined criteria (location, size,), generating less fragmentation in the address space, allowing the administrator to organize the creation of contiguous address ranges in an optimum way. SOLIDserver™ facilitates CIDR utilization in the network and minimizes the number of routes.

Unify Processes with Built-in Work Flow Features

SOLIDserver™ offers a unique working methodology to Service providers, through the application of a homogeneous management policy of requests’ processing. Requests are user-defined forms. The content of each form can be defined according to the type of request —technical information, services, request justification.

By allowing addresses attribution and liberation requests management, the Workflow management provision built-in to SOLIDserver™ offers four key benefits:

• Streamline resource request with user-defined forms for all IP resources
• Unify IPAM processes and synchronize activities of network teams
• Advanced status management and follow-up (new, handled, cancelled, rejected, in progress)
• Historical of all requests with Email exchanges archiving

Complete Life-Cycle RIR Declaration Management and Automation

The assignment of Internet IP addresses is governed by rules to which the operators have to refer and comply with. SOLIDserver™ integrates these rules in order to streamline and industrialize the declarations to the RIR:

• Aggregation: Ensure assignment of 80% of allocated IP addresses by the RIPE before requesting new allocation from the RIPE
• Registration: Register all required IP address assignment
• Conservation: Archive all exchanges with RIPE

Thanks to graphical assistants, the user is guided step-by-step, to allocate the addresses for his/her customers. SOLIDserver™ completes those processes by automatically checking required information such as the assignment window, by covering registration deletions, by importing data and storing all exchanges to the RIR. All specific RIR objects have a built-in management of their entire life-cycle:

• Person, Maintainer, Inetnum, Inet6num, Allocated PA / PI, Assigned PI / PA, LIR partition, Domain, Suballocation, Autnum/AS Number, Maintainer & Multi Maintainer

OSS Integration

Thanks to its opened architecture built on non-proprietary technologies SOLIDserver can be well integrated in any existing OSS (Operating Support System) using on demand requests based on web service (SOAP/XML/WSDL).

The data exchanges between SOLIDserver™ and an external referential ensures the continuity of the information flow in the information systems.