Aruba latest to turn WLAN inside-out
Pushes intelligence to the edge and adds wireline switches that can handle wireless clients too
Published: 15 March, 2011
READ MORE: Aruba Wireless Networks | Wi-Fi
A group of enterprise Wi-Fi start-ups came to prominence around 2003, on the basis of reinventing the wireless Lan. Fat access points were replaced with centralized switches and controllers, but now those same firms are redesigning the WLAN again to cope with rising demands on corporate networks. Aruba, for instance, is pushing intelligence to the edge again, with new switches that handle traffic from both wired and wireless devices.
Aruba is announcing a range of hardware and software to improve the corporate network's intelligence about a wide range of devices accessing it, under the umbrella label of Mobile Virtual Enterprise (MOVE). This includes the S3500 line of wired Ethernet switches for the wiring closet, which support Wi-Fi clients too. They automatically detect a Mobility Controller, which handles Aruba's Wi-Fi access points and downloads a set of client policies for configuration, device management and security. Those policies are then applied by the switch to PCs plus Wi-Fi and mobile clients.
The latest release of the ArubaOS firmware adds support for IPv6, and it can identify whether the device setting up a Wi-Fi connection is running Apple iOS - and furnish it with tailored access policies. This capability, which Aruba calls device fingerprinting and runs on MDAC (Mobile Device Admission Control), will be extended to other mobile platforms in future.
Also on the software side, Aruba is commercializing the self-service web portal technology that it acquired in January with Amigopod. This allows company staff to register their own devices and get the relevant access policies.
Finally, Aruba has announced three new families of access points. At the high end are the
AP-134 and AP-135, both of which use 802.11n and 3x2 MIMO to achieve peak data rates of 450Mbps. The 134 variant can use external directional antennas. The Aruba Instant AP range allows a remote site to deploy several APs, one of them running a subset of the ArubaOS software and acting as a controller for the rest. This provides a WLan that can be activated in three minutes. Finally, the AP-175 is Aruba's first outdoor 11n product, with 2x2 MIMO.
"Users no longer sit at a desk, and servers are no longer near a user's desktop, but virtualized and remote," Aruba CTO Keerti Melkote told NetworkWorld. "Today, the Lan needs to be able to handle mobile clients and cloud-based servers." It also needs to cope with the growing trend for 'bring your own' device policies in workplaces.
Other WLan switchmakers looking for new architectures include Motorola, acquirer of the original enterprise Wi-Fi leader Symbol. Last fall, the company introduced new WLan software that moved a high degree of intelligence into the APs to lower running costs compared to switch/controller designs. Aerohive and Meraki have taken more dramatic steps, the former shifting all control functions into its APs, and the latter to a cloud based service.
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