The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) sounded an alarm bell yesterday over the rapid depletion of IPv4 internet addresses and gave the IPv6 protocol another push.

In the new report titled The Future of the Internet Economy, which has been published ahead of the group’s ministerial meeting in Seoul next month, the OECD supports the widely-held view that the currently-used version of the Internet Protocol (IP) will run out of addresses in 2011.

It observed that “beyond building IPv6 skills and applications within governmental bodies, public procurement mandates also lead to a virtuous cycle of adoption by instigating the development of skills within technology partners”.

Network Address Translation (NAT), which makes it possible for several systems to share a single IPv4 address, is already widely used.

But it’s a stop gap system, viewed by some observers as an imperfect and costly work-around. The report claimed that enterprise and application vendors spend as much as 30 per cent of IT-related expenditures on the system’s sub-par communication protocol tweaks.

The report echoes internet search giant Google’s call earlier this week for the wider adoption of IPv6 as a long-term solution to what is becoming a growing concern for the tech industry.

“While technologies such as Network Address Translation can offer temporary respite,” it said, “they complicate the internet’s architecture, pose barriers to the development of new applications, and run contrary to network openness principles.”

Google also took the opportunity to point out that its search facility was now available over IPv6. It even gave Microsoft’s unloved OS a shout-out.

“With current operating systems such as Windows Vista, Mac OS X, and Linux providing high-quality support for IPv6, we hope it’s only a matter of time before IPv6 is widely deployed,” it said.

Source: The Register

The £12.7 billion National Health Service IT overhaul will arrive four years late, a report by the National Audit Office (NAO) says.

Launched in 2002, the National Programme for IT in the NHS was hoped to be completed by 2010, but a more realistic date is 2014/15 according to the report.

The system is hugely ambitious and will allow care professionals across England to access a patient’s medical records. However, in order to make the system work, the programme must first standardise equipment across the NHS – a huge undertaking. So huge in fact, the NAO claims the original timescale was unachievable.

Chairman of the committee of public accounts Edward Leigh MP admitted that rolling out the programme would be “challenging” and that the delivery expectations have already damaged its standing: “Over time, the Department of Health (DoH) has had its eyes opened to its enormous scale. And by building unrealistic expectations for delivery, confidence in the whole programme has been damaged.”

However, Leigh pointed out that positive changes have been made in the deployment of the programme: “My Committee reported on the programme last year and our recommendations have given the Department and the NHS a push in the right direction.”

“The scale of the challenge involved in delivering the National Programme for IT has proved to be far greater than envisaged at the start, with serious delays in delivering the new care records systems,” says NAO chief Tim Burr.

“Progress is being made, however, and financial savings and other benefits are beginning to emerge. The priority now is to finish developing and deploying care records systems that will help NHS Trusts to achieve the Programme’s intended benefits of improved services and better patient care.”

So far the estimated cost of the programme is £12.7 billion, but due to the delay in deployments, actual expenditure to date stands at £3.6 billion, lower than expected.

Source: PC Pro

Smart IT today unveiled their updated and restyled web site. Containing a wealth of information on the services and products offered by Smart IT including IT support for Chester, Manchester, Liverpool, Denbighshire, Wirral, Nantwich, Northwich, Tarporley, Warrington, Whitchurch and Wrexham.

Commenting on the new website, Barry Weaver, Managing Director, said “Our aim with the new website is to offer both existing and potential customers clear and understandable information on how we can help them with their business”

“Smart IT offer many different types of services which we feel will be a massive benefit to new and old customers alike – such as VOIP telephone systems, installations and IT solutions, network installations, antivirus software and IT consultancy to name but a few”.

“We will be striving to keep our IT news section up to date daily with relevant stories our customers might find of interest”.

“We will be working to strengthen our relationships with suppliers such as ESET, EMC, Microsoft and Dell to offer our customers unrivalled product provision competitiveness”

“We are also in talks with a market leading IFA software house to become their first ever IT company registered as a reseller”.