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Computerworld - EMC Corp. announced that the discovery and mapping capability within its EMC Smarts network management software family will work in IPv6 settings.

EMC is one of the first management software vendors to support native IPv6 networks, an EMC spokesman said. The networks will become increasingly important, because the U.S. government has required that all networks that access federal agencies must comply with native IPv6 by June 2008.

Smart IPv6 Availability Manager is available now and starts at $35,000, the spokesman said.

The new product provides discovery, mapping, monitoring and root-cause analysis of problems for IPv6 networks. It will also work with IPv4 networks and mixed environments.

IPv6, the emerging IP networking standard, offers the promise of a seemingly infinite number of IP addresses, which will help make it possible for businesses worldwide to network the explosion of new servers, laptops, phones and printers.

Experts predict the additional addresses will be needed because the current IPv4 address spaces will be exhausted between 2010 and 2012.

IPv6 is not being adopted as quickly in the U.S. as it is in some other countries, partly because of the greater number of IPv4 addresses available in the U.S. However, some independent experts have noted that eventually network managers will have to grapple with IPv6 conversions and might find network configurations to be time-consuming.

"There's a learning curve in setting up these environments," said Erica Johnson, the IPv6 consortium manager at the independent InterOperability Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, during an August interview explaining the results of IPv6 testing.

EMC also announced yesterday its IT Compliance Analyzer-Application Edition, which is designed to help IT shops ensure that their configurations comply with government regulations and other requirements. It will be available in October starting at $27,000.

The company also introduced the EMC IT Process Centre, the first in a family of software modules designed to automate IT processes across server, application, network and storage functions. It is shipping now, starting at $150,000.

EMC also announced its IT Performance Reporter-Network Edition, which delivers trends and historical data on network availability. Performance Reporter also works with other Smarts software products. It will be available next month. Pricing starts at $15,000.

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