IPv6 Mandates: Choosing a Transition Strategy, Preparing Transition Plans, and Executing the Migration of a Network to IPv6

Chapter 11. Knowing What Assets You Have

	Production is not the application of tools to materials, but logic to work.
	--Peter F. Drucker

According to the U.S. Census Bureau (http://www.census.gov/), the United States' first census was taken by U.S. marshals on horseback in 1790 and counted 3.9 million inhabitants. Today's U.S. population is a little over 300 million and the Bureau employs 12,000 people regularly in nearly 20 offices nationwide. The number of people working for the Bureau expands dramatically when the census is taken every 10 years. Census 2000 employed 860,000 temporary census workers or about 0.3 percent of the U.S. population at the time. As you can see, it's not a trivial effort to count large collections of people or things. The asset inventory you need to perform to facilitate your IPv6 upgrade is a lot like the censuses, and the difference between the early populations of Internet pioneers and today's modern enterprise networks is also similar to the nascent United States and the country that it is today. The break you get that the Census Bureau hasn't been able to fully utilize yet is that you can employ automated tools to count your assets. This chapter introduces you to those tools and describes how you can use them to make your inventory work easier.

What You'll Learn

This chapter focuses on the asset inventory work you will need to perform as part of your IPv6 transition. The emphasis is on using automated asset inventory and management tools to make your ...