BlueCat Networks released Monday upgraded versions of its DNS / DHCP and IP address-management appliances, which now manage both IPv4 IPv6 environments.

The company this week updated its two appliances -- Adonis and Proteus -- to include support for IPv4 and IPv6 networks, among other new features. IP address management is the practice of maintaining an up-to-date repository of all IP addresses within any given network. Vendors such as BlueCat, Cisco, eTelemetry, Infoblox, INS, Lucent, MetaInfo and Nortel provide management products for IP addresses as well as DNS and DHCP.

BlueCat's Adonis appliances enable network managers to centrally manage multiple DHS and DHCP configurations. Proteus is an enterprise-scale IP address-management appliance that combines name services, dynamic IP assignment and IP inventory. Companies with multiple Adonis appliances can manage them through Adonis console software or integrate them into a larger Proteus IP address-management system.

"Adonis is the worker bee. It provisions DNS, DHCP and TFTP, and up to 20 appliances can be managed with the Adonis management console," says David Berg, director of product management at BlueCat Networks. "Proteus is the appliance that oversees everything and manages Adonis as part of that."

The company enhanced Adonis 5.0, BlueCat says, with features that eliminate the need for network managers to have separate appliances to manage DNS and DHCP on their networks. Because the appliance is both IPv4- and IPv6-compliant, for instance, network managers can introduce IPv6 to their networks for new services, while keeping IPv4 in place to access legacy services.

Adonis 5.0 now includes preadmission network access-control features. The new feature would place devices with unknown or temporary IP addresses in a quarantine pool until they could be verified and allowed access to the network.

"For security reasons, network managers want to know at any given time when an IP address was granted to a machine, what the MAC address was and what authenticator the machine talked to," Berg explains. "This release can go as far as telling where people physically in relation to a router, switch or wireless access point."

BlueCat's enterprise-scale IP address-management appliance, Proteus 2.0, now includes a built-in migration engine that can import existing IP addresses scattered among multiple machines or tools into Proteus. The appliance, best suited for provisioning large-enterprise networks with broad IP address ranges, now enables delegated views of IP address information. The product can also identify when IP addresses have not been used in some time and alert network managers to reclaim the addresses to maximize their use.

"IP addresses are limited and expensive. Proteus can help get better use out of what you have," Berg says.

Pricing for Adonis 5.0 DNS/DHCP Network Appliance starts at about US$3,000. Pricing for Proteus 2.0 starts at about US$30,000. Both are available.