DDI Central 6500: Modern DHCP, unified visibility, and layered access control
DDI Central's release 6300 focused on authentication and identity: GSS-TSIG for secure DNS updates, LDAP/LDAPS-based user provisioning, and native Windows scavenging. Each aimed at cutting down the manual work behind keeping DNS and user access clean.
DDI Central 6500 shifts focus elsewhere. This release tackles three problems network teams run into as they scale: a DHCP engine that's nearing the end of its road, IP data spread thin across too many views to check during an incident, and access control that forces an all-or-nothing choice between full access and none. Lets see what DDI Central has to offer you with this new release.
What's new in DDI Central 6500?
Modern DHCP (Kea) support
Legacy DHCP, the engine behind most DDI Central deployments, is end-of-life. DDI Central 6500 adds support for Modern DHCP (Kea), Legacy DHCP's actively maintained successor, as a modern alternative.
Adding a Modern DHCP server works just like adding any other DHCP server, with one extra choice: a DHCP Engine field lets you pick Legacy (DHCPD) or Modern (Kea). It also brings a few capabilities DHCPD never had, like native IPv6 failover, along with its own high-availability model built on heartbeats rather than a shared lease-time split. Legacy and Modern coexist, so there's no forced migration, instead there's a real path off DHCPD when you're ready for one.
Keeping unwanted devices off the network is easier too, with the new Hardware Block List: block a MAC address outright and it's denied a DHCP lease entirely, no manual host-by-host cleanup needed. Bulk import and export via CSV make it easy to manage larger block lists across a network.
IPAM Unified View
DDI Central's IPAM Tower already lets you view IP space by site, cluster, or supernet—useful day to day, but switching between all three mid-incident wastes time you don't have.
Unified View consolidates all of it into one dashboard: visibility for total ranges, sites, clusters, and utilization, plus Table, Tree, and Heatmap views for browsing the data for deep insights. Import, export, and cluster sync are all available right from the same screen, so there's no need to jump elsewhere to keep the data current.
Operator+
The standard Operator role grants access at the module level: DNS, DHCP, or both, and that's workable for a small team, but not once you want to bring on more people without handing everyone the same blanket access.
Operator+ adds object-level control within DNS and DHCP: specific domains, subnets, views, and policies, each scoped independently per cluster. Network admins get narrowed down, layered controls over their DNS and DHCP objects and grant specific access to the right users.
Ready to bring DDI Central 6500 into your network?
Between Modern DHCP support, IPAM Unified View, and Operator+, DDI Central 6500 gives you a DHCP engine that isn't running on borrowed time, one dashboard to make sense of your entire IP space, and the access control to grow your team without growing your risk.
Upgrade to 6500 today or start your 30-day free trial to see the difference it makes in your environment.