We here at AirWave were absolutely smitten when we found out that the AirWave Wireless Management Suite Version 5.3 was chosen; in addition, Craig did an excellent job providing those unfamiliar with our solution an excellent synopsis of the features and benefits of our solution. If you’ve not yet heard it, click here to listen to Network World’s Category Buster: AWMS 5.3.

Summary from the Network World site:

As part of the Best Products 2008 coverage, we present a special podcast with Network World blogger and IT Roadmap presenter Craig Mathias, who talks about the distinguishing features and functionality of the latest Air[W]ave Wireless Management suite (12:01).

I encourage all of you to give it a listen and/or pass it on to anyone who you feel could benefit from understanding the features and functionalities of AWMS.

It’s great to finally see the industry recognizing WLAN management as a criticial component of an organization’s infrastructure.

For more Craig Mathias, click here.

In this latest installment of AirWaves, I spoke with Ron Jones who is one of the Network Systems Managers for Manatee County School District, one of the largest in the country with over 49,000 students and 7,000 employees.

Like most school districts, the wireless network at Manatee has grown over time. Manatee CSD now has about 2,000 wireless access points from Cisco and ProCurve by HP and serves up wireless access to just about every campus in the district.

As you can imagine, Ron has his hands full and has found ways to use his AirWave Management Platform to streamline many of the manual processes.

As some of you may have heard, the California State University System announced back in September that all 23 schools will eventually be moving off of Cisco WLAN gear and onto Aruba Networks products. AirWave is currently being used to manage and monitor wireless networks at 7 of the CSU campuses including CSU San Marcos.

In this episode of AirWaves I spoke with John Humes who is the Network Manager at CSU San Marcos and was on the evaluation committee that selected Aruba as the standard for the CSU system moving forward.

Like many of the CSU schools, San Marco is currently using Cisco for their WLAN infrastructure and John discusses the issues he faces on a daily basis and how a tool like AirWave makes his life easier.

John also describes the migration path and how AirWave’s multi-vendor capabilities will play a strategic role in their network moving forward.

Managing anything in a K-12 environment can be a very strenuous activity. Imagine all those different school buildings, thousands of students, parents, and teachers and then multiply that by government regulation and bureaucracy. In this episode of AirWaves we speak with Michael Cooper of Oak Hills Local School District who has been managing a Cisco autonomous AP based network for several years. Michael shares his thoughts on WLAN network management and how he transitioned from an, “I’ll just console in,” management style to valuing the benefits of an enterprise grade network management tool. Please take a listen and provide your feedback in our forums.

There has been a lot of press recently around Denver International Airport moving from a “paid” wifi service to a “free” service. I had the opportunity to speak with Mikael Rasmussen who is the WiFi Manager for Qwest Government Services and has the actual responsibility for running and maintaining all of the wireless LAN services at DIA. The free network is getting most of the publicity today but Mikael also has the responsibility for other wireless LAN services that the airlines and the airport use for things like baggage handling and security. Mikael inherited the AirWave Wireless Management Suite when Qwest took over responsibility for the network but has quickly become a convert as he’s had to deal with legacy networks and multiple vendors. Take a listen and feel free to post questions on our forum.

This week we recorded a podcast with the main wireless LAN guys from MIT, Brown and Princeton…hence the Ivy+ League moniker. Chris, Don, and Daniel offer candid insights into how they are managing their campus wide WLAN deployments, where their networks are headed and how they are dealing with new technologies like 802.11 and the iPhone. These guys have been cumulatively running wireless networks for over 10 years and they have all seen the impact of different radio technologies, wireless LAN architectures, and physical deployment scenarios. If you are managing your own wireless LAN or would like to learn from people who are managing hundreds of wireless nodes and supporting thousands of wireless clients, please take a listen.

I had the pleasure to record a podcast with Ray Sliteris of Intel to discuss how they manage their internal wireless LAN on a global basis. Managing over 6,000 access points and controllers is a pretty huge task for any corporation; these guys have the added benefit of working for a company that is a main driver behind the entire WiFi industry.

A few interesting items that particularly caught my attention:

1. Last year they were almost 100% autonomous access points and now they are about 25% converted to a controller based approach. This migration will take them several years to move entirely to a thin AP model. My guess is most organizations are like this, they would very much like to take advantage of the “latest and greatest” but due to organizational inertia and network size it takes a while to make any radical changes.

2. The biggest challenges they faced in deploying a network of this size were creating consistent configurations and having a global network view.

3. 802.11n is not a big push for them. They are testing this new technology out in a few areas but they see this as a 2009 production deployment type of technology. The big business drivier for Intel will not necessarily be the additional throughput but rather the improved connection reliability inherent with MIMO.

Please take a listen to the podcast and let me know what you think!