Aerohive

This week in WLAN adoption: John Marshall Law buys Aerohive, Virginia Union Univ. buys Aruba

In a new semi-regular feature on The Network Hub, I’m going to provide a quick run-down of newly announced wireless LAN projects. I get a lot of press releases from WLAN vendors about customer wins. I don’t get to write about all of them, but I can at least offer you a quick summary of the latest decisions your peers have made.

First up is John Marshall Law School, which is deploying an 802.11n wireless LAN network from Aerohive Networks on its Chicago campus. The school is replacing a legacy WLAN from Airspace (acquired by Cisco in 2005).  The old system was presenting interference and attenuation problems within the school’s century-old buildings. Centralized management was also an issue. The school chose Aerohive from a short list that also included Aruba, Meru and Xirrus.  The school chose Aerohive for its ease of deployment, controllerless architecture and wireless mesh capabilities, according to the case study.

Also this week, Aruba Networks announced that Virginia Union University has chosen their 802.1n wireless LAN to retrofit the wireless network on its 84-acre campus in Richmond (Click on this link for more information on Aruba’s specific solutions for the education market). The school had a network of independent, “Fat AP” access points that lacked centralized management capabilities and performance. Robert Gray, the schools IT director, said he chose Aruba’s AP-125 access points for their coverage and range. He is also using some of Aruba’s advanced management technologies, such as Adaptive Radio Management, Aruba’s policy-enforcement firewall and the AirWave Wireless Management Suite.

Aerohive comes up with a new approach to WLAN airtime fairness

When I have conversations with network managers about whether they plan to upgrade to 802.11n wireless LAN technology, many say they’re in no hurry. They’re still getting plenty out of their existing 802.11a/b/g infrastructure, they say. And besides, all the legacy clients in their organization would just slow down the 802.11n clients, preventing users from enjoying the benefits of a faster wireless network. Access points are usually shared by multiple clients and clients can only transmit to an access point one at a time. This often means that faster 802.11n clients are stuck in a queue behind slower legacy clients that take much longer to transmit the same amount of data.

Several WLAN vendors, such as Meru Networks and Aruba Networks,  have developed technologies to solve this problem.  For instance, Aruba’s Adaptive Radio Management software can shift WLAN clients to different radio frequencies and can analyze the 802.11x protocol used by the client. If the client is a faster 802.11n device, the software gives it priority

Aerohive Networks, a start-up known for its controllerless WLAN architecture, has found a new way to tackle this problem. In the latest version of its operating system, HiveOS 3.2, Aerohive has introduced a new feature called Dynamic Airtime Scheduling.  Rather than making airtime decisions based on protocol, Aerohive actually examines the airtime of the client’s packets to determine how fast it is. This is relevant because the farther a client is from an access point, the slower its transmission. So an 802.11n client which is much farther away from an access point than 802.11g client is could actually be slower. The Aerohive AP will give priority to the .11g client since its signal is closer and thus faster. With this technology, Aerohive can also give priority to a fast 802.11n client over a slower 802.11n client.

Dynamic Airtime Scheduling also applies policy to the clients as well. For instance, a company can give airtime priority to employee devices over guest devices,

Niall Pariag, senior network administrator at Riverside Health Care Systems Inc., a network of hospitals and clinics based in Yonkers, N.Y., is in the process of replacing legacy Cisco infrastructure in his facilities with Aerohive 802.11n access points. He said Dynamic Airtime Scheduling solves a problem he’s been worried about ever since he decided to upgrade to 801.11n.

“It solves the only quirk we had with the wireless network, that slow clients basically slow down fast clients,” he said. “That’s a concern we kept ignoring, because we knew we were going to cross that bridge when we got to it. We don’t have that many clients connecting now, so it wasn’t a concern.”

Pariag said that in the future his company will be adding more and more clients to the wireless network, and airtime scheduling will become critical to him.