Recently, while getting some bids for a home construction project, one of them came back with a dollar figure coupled with this caveat: ‘Bigger than a bread box, smaller than a submarine.’ I see this same kind of concept practiced with wireless capacity planning at a lot of the companies that see on a day to day basis.

Why do so many IT departments follow this planning philosophy?

Well, it boils down to not having the reporting and visibility required to make good business decisions to maximize the IT budget.

Over the last year, I have done several webcasts around capacity planning and wireless best practices. Most of these have focused around the wireless side of the equation, but as wireless becomes more ubiquitous, there is now the requirement to look at other pieces of the puzzle as well. Take for example the wireless hotspot marketplace. Many of these locations are served with DSL or cable modem access. Remote office locations are also typically served by these types of links as well. In this case, what component is the weak link in the chain? Of course, the WAN link is the limiting factor!

In the latest version of the AirWave Management Platform, there is now the ability to monitor and report on switches, routers, and other gear in the network that can impact the wireless network. In addition, there is a new Capacity Planning report that not only shows the capacity of the wireless APs and controllers, but can also show capacity available on other network components as well.

In case you missed it, industry expert Craig Mathias was featured on Network World’s podcast series to discuss his selection for the WLAN industry’s “Category-Breaker,” defined as “products that go above and beyond to solve IT issues.”

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 the ‘Troubleshooting the WLAN’ webcast that I did earlier this week, I talked about the technical items that the helpdesk really needs to know to move from a ‘Production Metric’ helpdesk to a ‘Customer Service’ helpdesk. The helpdesk industry over the last decade has really moved from being an organization that is geared around hold times, abandonment rates, tickets opened, calls received, and other production metrics to an organization that starts to value the ‘softer’ side of the call center.

These ‘softer’ customer service metrics are geared around first call resolution, reopened ticket percentage, and other items that revolve around how the caller feels about the experience, rather than just how fast the helpdesk can pick up the phone. If we look out at the IT industry as a whole, there have been several recent examples of large IT companies who forgot that customer satisfaction is just as important as how fast you answer the phone! Now, those companies are paying for it with reduced sales, a falling stock price, and erosion of their corporate brand value.

So, to take this down from an overall corporate view and apply it to the wireless helpdesk, what do we need to give to our front line employees to improve their customer service metrics? Well, it boils down to giving them the applications to solve problems immediately, and if they can’t be solved at their level, the ability to escalate to the proper team for a quick resolution.

In the wireless space, it’s all about letting the helpdesk view real time user information, visually displaying RF information in an easy to read format (remember, the helpdesk is not staffed with RF engineers), trending information (see my earlier blog on ‘Troubleshooting Deltas’), and other troubleshooting dashboards. This way, the helpdesk can accurately diagnose the problem and either fix the issue, or get the trouble ticket to the correct place in the least amount of time.

Once the helpdesk is able to start focusing on the ‘softer’ side of their business, the user satisfaction rates will go up and the ROI of the wireless network starts to really take hold.

 

 AirWaves Podcast with Manatee Schools [20:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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.

Managed Service Providers (or MSP’s) have been participating in a pretty high growth business environment over the last few years. These organizations range from the major Telcos (Verizon and AT&T) to major hardware vendors (IBM and HP) to major System Integrators (CSC and Accenture) to regional niche players. It seems that just about anyone who is involved in IT wants to join the lucrative business of outsourcing or co-sourcing their customers networks and environments.

As WLANs become more prevalent and mission critical, this new area of networking is drawing the attention of many of these players. A year and a half ago, Verizon Business was one of the first to jump in a public way into this arena. It makes sense with Verizon’s history of wireless, networking, and now outsourcing, that they would be a leader in WLAN management. But Verizon Business is not alone in this field. Just about every MSP that offers network management is preparing to also offer WLAN management.

As these organizations enter into the WLAN management arena there are a few pitfalls they need to be aware of:

1. WLANs need to be managed differently the LANs. Due to the inherent nature of wireless, these devices need to be monitored in very different ways than their router and switch brethren. MSPs who make the mistake of just offering simple “up/down” status will not be doing their customer any favors - it is critical to provide RF management and optimization to ensure that not only are devices up, but that the network is actually working.
2. WLAN management needs to be integrated with LAN management. I think MSPs grasp this one pretty quickly - from a purely cost perspective. If the MSP has to build out a parallel infrastructure just for WLAN management then it will take them a long time to make a profit. By integrating WLAN specific tools into their existing operational infrastructure they can gain leverage and re-use many of the skill sets and processes that they have in house.
3. WLAN is just the beginning. Any MSP who starts discussing with their customer about managing their WLAN needs to understand that its not just the APs and/or controllers that need to be managed…it’s all the rest of the network as well. This includes the authentication infrastructure, the wired network that the wireless devices connect to, power, firewalls, etc. This is a great opportunity for the MSP to showcase all of their wares but they have to have this mindset from the beginning.

MSPs have a great opportunity in the WLAN space and can provide a fantastic service to their clients. As this market matures this level of service is going to become more and more important.

At AirWave, people constantly ask us “Why is it important to select a vendor-neutral wireless management solution if I have an ‘all-Cisco’ [or all-Aruba, all-Symbol, all-Anyone…] network?”

A few things to consider:

• You might have a heterogeneous network and not even know it — In large organizations, the left hand often doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Is it possible [likely?] that a division somewhere in the world purchased some equipment that you don’t know about? If you use only proprietary single-vendor management tools that only discover APs and controllers manufactured by your primary hardware vendor, you may never find out — and if you do have some other equipment out there, you won’t be able to manage it and enforce your security policies using your proprietary tool.
• Wireless technology is still evolving — and so are wireless product lines. WiFi is so ubiquitous that people forget that the technology is still young. Many new technologies and standards [802.11n, anyone?] are still being developed. Hardware vendors will implement these technologies on different schedules and in different ways. Using a vendor-neutral management solution gives you the ability to evaluate new offerings as they come out — and to select the ones that best meet your needs, even if they’re from someone other than your primary vendor.
• Mergers & acquisitions — in the U.S. alone, there were more than 11,000 mergers in 2006. Every time corporations merge, IT has to knit together the diverse infrastructure of the two entities. Smart IT organizations understand this and select vendor-neutral management tools that enable them to control the infrastructure they have today — and what they’re going to inherit tomorrow.
• Maintain flexibility and control your own destiny. If you rely on proprietary management solution, you don’t control your network — your vendor does. If your vendor end-of-lifes management support for your product, you’re stuck. Time to upgrade. When you’re negotiating the price of your hardware, you’re not going to get much of a discount if your provider knows that your management solution won’t allow you to switch to a competitive product. If you’ve got flexibility, you’ve got leverage.

Recently some of my colleagues attended the National Retail Federation show in New York City. Just before show started, AirDefense did a survey of almost 800 stores in the New York City area to get a sense of what kind of security was in place. The results, while very dismal for retailers, are not very surprising at all. There were still many places where no security is in place or the easily broken WEP key was still being used.

This brings us to a bit of a quandary. How do we make it easier to implement better security and provide a way to audit the network while detecting rogue devices? Well there are a couple of things that we can do to help mitigate the security risk.

First, there needs to be a realization that security is not just a ‘point’ product or a ‘once in awhile’ process. It’s something that needs to be integrated directly into the organization. Using tools that can manage configurations centrally and can audit the network to make sure those configuration policies are consistent is key. This applies to not only the RF settings (i.e. what you’re broadcasting out of your AP), but also the wireline side of your devices. Remember, there are threats coming from inside the network as well!

I’ve been into many customer sites over the years, many of them retailers, and it still amazes me how some customers can be so organized where they know each and every configuration setting on their devices, while others haven’t the slightest clue what’s actually running in their own network. How can we have a secure network that will pass PCI audits when no one actually knows what’s loose on the network?!

The second item that the survey brought up was the number of potential rogue devices that were deployed. PCI today only requires quarterly scans for rogue devices. I’m not sure about you, but that seems a bit long to me! Putting in automated tools to detect these devices as soon as possible is much more in the spirit of true security. In addition to doing wireless scans, which only determines that someone is bleeding into your RF space, performing a wireline scan to determine if the device is truly a security threat is important. By determining whether a device is actually plugged into the wired network it reduces the amount of work involved with determining whether something is ‘truly’ a rogue or if it’s just the AP in the Starbucks across the street.

The whole key to this endeavor is to take the concept of security and making it a part of the day to day operations of the IT staff.

 

 AirWave Podcast with CSU San Marcos [15:31m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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.

Last week I spent some time doing half-day AirWave training road shows. Most of the folks in my classes were from small to medium size companies and the types of questions that I received really hit home that there is still a lot of wireless training that needs to be done to bring everyone up to speed.

For example:

• Why in the U.S. do we typically only use channels 1,6, and 11?
• Should all of my APs at a single site have the same SSID’s?
• What does RSSI and dbm mean when talking about wireless signals?

These are basic questions that all wireless administrators should understand.

There are several courses out in the market place today that try to address the basics of wireless networking. I would recommend some of the CWNP classes (www.cwnp.com). These courses are great for people who already understand some of the basic network concepts, but want to elevate their wireless knowledge level and increase their marketability to employers.

This morning, we announced that AirWave has agreed to merge with Aruba Networks. We expect this to be great news for our customers. Our mission remains absolutely unchanged: to develop the premier multi-vendor management software that allows our customers to operate and support their wireless networks.

Aruba is fully committed to operating AirWave as a business unit focused on developing and providing multi-vendor management software. The AirWave software will simply get better, because we’re going to have the resources of a larger organization behind us – and we expect this will enable us to add support for even more hardware vendors. Supporting the leading hardware vendors that our customers choose is critical to everything we do.

We believe in open, standards-based technology – and in giving every customer the freedom to choose the products that best meet their specific requirements. Aruba believes exactly the same thing… and that’s why this combination makes so much sense to us.

I’ve spoken with and emailed a number of AirWave customers this morning and have been very touched that many so people’s first questions have been, “What does this mean for AirWave employees? Is everyone going to be OK?”. First… I want to thank everyone for their concern for the people they’ve built relationships with over the past several years. I also want to reassure everyone that this transaction is a very good thing for the people of AirWave – AirWave’s employees are being kept together as a team and will operate as business unit. This will provide us the additional resources we need to develop even more interesting applications in the future.

From a customer perspective, nothing changes. You should call the same support number, talk to the same people, log into the same user forum… We’re here to help, and if you have any questions, just give us a call.