IPv4 Address Space Reclamation & Network Segregation

Technical leadership and automation for two high-visibility Oracle Global IT initiatives—helping reclaim public IPv4 capacity for cloud growth while reducing the risk and effort of large-scale network change.

Overview

Following a major Global IT restructuring, Oracle launched the Network Segregation program to disentangle infrastructure shared across three newly independent IT organizations. I served as Technical Lead for the program and later applied the same automation and dependency-analysis capabilities to Oracle's IPv4 Address Space Reclamation initiative.

The reclamation program was created to recover 2.1 million public IPv4 addresses from a portfolio of 3.5 million addresses and make that capacity available for Oracle's growing cloud business. The work required identifying address usage, mapping infrastructure dependencies, coordinating application owners, and executing thousands of production changes with minimal disruption.

My Contribution

I built a Perl- and MySQL-based network intelligence toolset that converted fragmented DNS, network, server, virtualization, storage, and application data into queryable operational intelligence. This gave engineers a fast, repeatable way to determine what needed to change, who would be affected, and how far an outage or migration impact could propagate.

My responsibilities included:

Leading technical planning and execution for Network Segregation and IPv4 re-addressing events.
Analyzing application, server, network, virtualization, and storage dependencies before production changes.
Identifying systems eligible for re-addressing, consolidation, or retirement.
Coordinating changes across infrastructure teams, application owners, lines of business, data centers, and time zones.
Creating reports that reduced uncertainty and minimized unplanned customer impact.

Automation I Built

Network Identification Tool

I created a Perl ingestion pipeline that parsed DNS and network exports into a MySQL database containing information for more than 17,000 subnets. A companion CLI supported lookups by IP address, data center, network zone, VLAN, and subnet.

The existing administrative process handled approximately 50 hosts in 15 seconds. My tool processed 500 IP addresses in under 12 seconds while returning substantially richer network context—more than a 10× throughput improvement.

Example output included:

DNS name and IP address
Current and target address classification
Zone and VLAN mappings
Network and subnet boundaries
Gateway, broadcast address, and netmask
Re-addressing status

Topology and Dependency Automation

I also developed topology automation that joined physical hosts, virtual machines, application metadata, DNS records, network assignments, and mounted storage into a unified dependency view.

The system could quickly answer questions such as:

Which systems reside on a specific network or VLAN?
Which applications depend on a physical host, storage system, zone, or data center?
Which servers have cross-zone storage mounts?
Who owns each affected application or service?
What is the downstream impact if a host, storage platform, network zone, or data center becomes unavailable?

These capabilities were reused across Network Segregation, IPv4 Reclamation, and Storage Consolidation.

Results

Led analysis and planning that supported the re-addressing of more than 1,300 systems across IPv4 Reclamation and Network Segregation.
Helped reclaim IPv4 capacity needed for Oracle Cloud growth without additional address-acquisition spend.
Supported an early program milestone reclaiming 20 Class B address blocks with minimal production impact.
Helped the broader IPv4 program execute more than 5,200 changes, coordinate nearly 100 resources, and maintain a near-zero error or failure rate.
Identified hundreds of servers for end-of-life through dependency and utilization analysis.
Reduced the Network Segregation delivery schedule by three months.
Minimized downtime and avoided unnecessary impact to critical enterprise applications through detailed dependency analysis and coordinated change planning.

Recognition

My contribution to IPv4 Reclamation and Network Segregation was recognized through a CIO regional award and an Oracle Global IT Rewards & Recognition award. The CIO recognition specifically cited my technical leadership, the re-addressing of more than 1,300 systems, the identification of hundreds of systems for retirement, and the three-month reduction in the Network Segregation schedule.

Oracle CIO regional recognition for IPv4 Reclamation and Network Segregation

CIO regional recognition for technical leadership across IPv4 Reclamation and Network Segregation.

CIO leadership email recognizing the IPv4 Reclamation program

CIO leadership recognition following the successful reclamation of 20 Class B address blocks with minimal production impact.

Oracle Global IT Rewards and Recognition award for IPv4 Reclamation

Global IT recognition describing the program's scale, operational outcomes, and contribution to Oracle Cloud growth.