Recently there was an interesting thread on managing WLANs where 1 university was able to briefly describe their network and look for feedback on what they should do. AirWave received some nice mentions from both customers as well as people who looked at the software and for one reason or another weren’t able to move forward with a purchase. Take a look and let us know if there are other forums you use where IT people can exchange ideas on wireless local area networking.

Here are some of the key stats:

• 50% of the respondents visit the forums two or more times a week; 17% visit multiple times a day
• Given a scale of horrible/poor/fair/good/excellent (horrible equaling 1 pt; excellent 5), not a single participant selected “horrible” or “poor” for any of the seven forum aspect rating questions
• Overall, the forum received a better-than-”good” rating (4.14)
• Six of the seven forum aspects received an average grade of “good” or better, with “Community Responsiveness” the only piece just shy of “good” (at 3.78, it looks like we all better pick it up!)
• Half of the forum survey respondents also read the blog; 33% didn’t know we had one
• 58% of our readers subscribe to our RSS feed

For the full details, click here (I encourage you to read the custom text sections; that’s where most of the gemlike feedback lies).

Oh yeah.  The contest winner.  I nearly forgot. :)

And wouldn’t you know it but our sole International respondent is the lucky recipient of the amazon.com gift card.  Ron of T-Systems Business Services GmbH leveraged his weekly visit to the airwaves forum to pound out his response.  Great job, Ron.  I hope they ship to Germany!

Thanks again to all who took the time to help make airwaves better.

And while the contest is over, feedback is always appreciated. 

But before we all blindly make that “leap” from our trusted 802.11b/g access points to the Holy Grail we know as .11n, perhaps time should be made for some of the drawbacks or concerns that MIMO technology can bring to a network (then you can get back to being overjoyed with the concept of getting your hands on it).

Aruba’s heralded WLAN security expert Joshua Wright did just that for AirWave last week, detailing the following on our most recent webcast:

• An introduction to 802.11n and its benefits
• Risks associated with the extended range of 802.11n MIMO transmitters in conjunction with legacy SISO transmitters
• The challenges in monitoring 40 MHz wireless and new spectrum utilization
• New challenges for WIDS and rogue detection in 802.11n
• New denial of service vulnerabilities
• New security threats for 802.11n wireless clients
• Threat mitigation strategies

Beyond that, we have a new airwaves forum category which is housing any additional follow-up questions, either for Joshua, or for AirWave.

At this point, though, I’m going to simply point you to the webcast itself, so that you can stop reading this and start educating yourself on 802.11n’s very own security concerns.

Click here to view the New Risks in 802.11n webcast

As is typical with these semi-half-baked deployments that are for “playing around with”, they become mission critical overnight and IT is asked (OK, demanded) to maintain and operate them with the same level of service as every other piece on infrastructure on the network. In most organizations this has meant that the poor network engineer who designed the initial deployment now has to figure out “Phase 2″ as well as keep the existing set-up in place and operational. This typically means moving to a controller-based design that automates much of the manual processes involved in tuning and updating wireless devices. This new architecture solved some of the short term issues around RF management and centralization of traffic.

Now comes phase 3: figuring out how to take this wireless LAN and truly fold it into the entire network operations environment and provide a scalable way to support it (aka ITIL).

The first step in this process involves organizations looking at how to tie in the WLAN with their existing event correlation and helpdesk systems. As an example, many organizations are using Remedy for trouble ticketing and EMC SMARTS for event correlation (there are obviously lots of other solutions on the market, these are just common systems that I run into in the field). Support for the WLAN needs to come in 2 directions, pro-active and re-active. Pro-active where the network itself tells you there is a problem and creates a process for resolution; re-active is where users call in and tell IT that there is something wrong.

For the pro-active model, IT can set up their WLAN infrastructure to send traps to SMARTS as well as all the other network components (switches, routers, authentication servers, etc.) AirWave can also send traps to SMARTS based on more intelligent WLAN events than you get from the WLAN devices themselves (too many users, too much bandwidth over x amount of time, too many authentication failure, rogue devices, etc). SMARTS is able to correlate all of this information and then generate tickets within Remedy for the IT organization to go out and solve. For WLAN specific issues this can include going in to the AirWave console to troubleshoot and resolve those problems.

For the re-active model, IT can generate a ticket directly within Remedy and then tie in WLAN specific information from AirWave (AirWave now integrated with Remedy). The helpdesk can post information about the condition of the WLAN on the spot with very little understanding of wireless LAN specific issues. If the issues needs to be escalated then all of the time relevant information gets passed on to the level 2/3 teams to resolve.

By tying these 3 systems together, the IT organization can leverage their existing investments, processes, and tool sets to now manage the WLAN.

Unfortunately, it is a concept that tends to frighten Corporate America.

Just think about it… between your iPhone, iTunes, USB-to-whatever-Apple-uses, iPod, and iLife, you’re all but fully committed to Apple, for better or worse.

But what if you wanted to manage your iPhone with something other than iTunes? After all, the interface is clunky, it converts your files into a (shockingly) proprietary audio format, and can take up more RAM than a fully loaded Microsoft Outlook. Well, good luck finding a supported software solution out there.

Apple will never in a million years tell you about an iTunes alternative, even if it means a better user experience for their customers. They are only interested in keeping you locked into their solution for as long as possible (which for them may be quite a while).

Meanwhile, folks in the networking industry are feeling trapped in their own right. With proprietary device management solutions, you need to upgrade or replace any hardware that is not supported by their current offering, or be left with gaping security holes in your network. In other words, you must assimilate!

But what happened to our freedom? It seems to me like it was discontinued a couple revs back.

AirWave Wireless is the alternative to WLAN vendor tyranny.

We give you the freedom to choose the best hardware for your environment, regardless of vendor, architecture, model #, firmware version, number of users, number of devices, whatever. We really don’t care what you have. We just help you secure it and support it.

Without a tool like the AirWave Wireless Management Suite (AWMS), you are handing your decision making power to a single corporation who can’t help but look after what is in the best interest of themselves.

Happy 4th of July!

To Be, Or Not To Be (All WiFi)

The bold stance at this time, of course, is to truly “cut the cord,” with Bill Gates & Co. having decided that the recent advances in RF distribution (802.11n, anyone?) and the now-80 gigabit capacity of the Aruba 6000 controllers were enough to move forward with a concept that to many is still just an idea being kicked around the heads of their IT department.

As you could probably guess, the WLAN industry is excited to see anyone cut the cord, but we get especially overjoyed to see a company like Microsoft make such an announcement. It is, truly, just a matter of time before others feel this same level of confidence, making the transition to a solution that has long been touted as a productivity enhancing, operational cost reducing, world hunger curing euphoria of a network experience.

All over-dramatization aside, the ROI results are tangible, only becoming increasingly convincing in this “next generation” of WiFi networks.

So, what’s the catch?

Well, as Microsoft can attest, it’s now management:

“The weak link in the WLAN offerings from a lot of vendors is the ability to manage these huge enterprise-wide WLAN deployments centrally, so that you have a centralized view and can drill down from that centralized view to provide information on the number of clients that you have, outages that are affecting your network in multiple client areas, the RF health of the system—all of those things still are lagging behind the Wi-Fi technology,” [Victoria Poncini of Microsoft] says. “That’s an area that, if vendors could provide the most improvement, it would really help towards providing an all-wireless office—and that’s something that we want to do with 802.11n.”

While we have a job securely lined up for Victoria after her ringing endorsement of the necessity for enterprise-grade WLAN management, the reality is she is just being frank about the issues that have arisen as organizations try to make this transition.

And if you have been around us long enough, you know the message of scaling manageability is one we’ve been preaching from our very first release of the AirWave Management Platform (AMP).

Apparently Victoria has heard our sermons:

“The combination of the AirWave platform with [Aruba’s] current offering, and what they’re trying to do to integrate the two of them together, is a really good start towards providing what we would like to see in network management,” she says.

Alas, despite our incessant ranting & raving, it is still the oft-overlooked component of a corporation’s initial WLAN investment. Note my use of the word “initial,” as typically an organization will begin feeling the “hurt” some time shortly after they’ve deployed their nebulous WiFi infrastructure, only to call on AirWave like a shamed friend needing to get picked up from jail.

We’ll bail you out, buddy. But in return, we’d like you to do a case study.

Unfortunately for the parties involved, it wasn’t altogether positive or reassuring:

• Networkworld.com: “…Some might consider it a step toward vendor lock-in. And it’s not yet clear how the acquisition will affect Trapeze’s recently renewed OEM arrangement with Nortel and Belden’s with single-channel WLAN startup Extricom. Remember when Airespace was acquired by Cisco? It was a nightmarish move for Nortel and other Airespace OEMs and their customers to find alternative solutions.”
• Techworld.com: “There’s also a perception that Trapeze has been struggling - at least in terms of reaching customers. “People have been picking other suppliers largely because Trapeze does not have the market access model that someone like Cisco would have,” said the Belden executive.”
• Unstrung.com: “Between 2002 and 2004, Trapeze, along with Airespace and Aruba Wireless Networks , emerged as one of the leading startups set on managing enterprise WiFi. Since then, however, Cisco Systems Inc. bought Airespace and cemented its 60 percent-plus lead in the corporate WiFi market. Aruba and Motorola Inc. have been duking it out for the second-place spot, and other startups such as Meru Networks Inc. have been challenging for Trapeze’s share of the market.”
• Network Computing Blog: “It’s one thing to sell cables and connectors, it’s quite another to sell an enterprise networking solution with moving parts and software bits. Do enterprises typically consider buying their networking equipment from the same guys who sell them 1,000-foot spools of cable?”

While this looks to be a solid move for Belden moving forward, I have to wonder what the impact is for those who have already done business with Trapeze.

As evidenced, questions abound regarding the future of Trapeze, not only for their own customers & VARs, but for their OEM partners‘ (3Com, Nortel, D-Link, Enterasys) customers & VARs as well. What happens to their WLAN roadmap? Will they continue to receive the same support? Will Trapeze end of life (EOL) their pre-existing hardware? Will they cut their OEM relationships altogether?

These are all valid questions, and as we learned from the Airespace acquisition a few years past, it can and does get as bad as companies being stuck with gear that nobody will support.

It is with that in mind that we here at AirWave have offered everyone affected an “Investment Protection Program,” which extends discounted pricing on the AirWave Wireless Management Suite (AWMS) 6. AWMS lends folks the flexibility of a vendor-neutral management console for their legacy Trapeze/Nortel/3Com/D-Link/Enterasys gear, as well as whichever vendor(s) they eventually migrate to.

This is not the first, nor will it be the last, acquisition of its kind. And for those wary of your current hardware provider’s fate… don’t worry.

We’ll be there for you, too.

Also, the airlines and the FAA have spent years touting the dangers of wireless devices on planes (whether real or imagined, we don’t really know yet). Sorry folks, but it’s going to take a complete ‘about face’ before WiFi on planes moves into the mainstream.

The other issue with WiFi in the Sky is the backhaul links. Just lighting up the inside of a metal tube with 802.11 signals isn’t really the hard part. How do you get the data off the plane and on to the ‘Net?

The two main methods at this point have been to send it to a satellite or send it down to base stations on the ground. I’ve been on customer networks that have had satellite links between their locations and it’s not fun. Email and slow browsing are the facts of life. Slow bandwidth, coupled with high/variable packet latency kills most advanced media from traversing the link.

Ground based stations seem to have the promise of more bandwidth and more control over the network, but placement of base stations can be problematic, unless an already mature technology is used (i.e. EVDO/GPRS).

Whatever the future holds for Internet access in the sky, I sure hope is comes before I hit the next million mile mark!

It’s not a matter of “if”; now it’s a matter of how.

Click here to view the 802.11n in Higher Education Webcast

Our three panelists – Chris Murphy from MIT, Steve Lee from Virginia Tech, and Dan Eklund from Wayne State – were peppered with a non-stop stream of questions about implementation and deployment – concerning multiple radio frequencies, deployment, spacing, transition, capacity planning and more. Chris and Dan are deploying 802.11n now; Steve is holding off for the moment, which provided an interesting counterpoint to discussions.

And while the discussion was solely focused on the campus environment, I think anyone looking to deploy 802.11n in the near future will find this a useful discussion to listen in on, since most of the issues addressed are the same, whether your network serves a college, a company, a school or a government agency.

Feedback was very positive. Over 300 people attended. More are downloading it daily. Sample feedback: “I found this especially interesting and helpful since you featured multiple universities using different wireless vendors.”

Not for the first time, our panelists came across as three tough and experienced customers, who have high standards for their vendors and suppliers and a clear understanding of how to make technology fit the needs and goals of their employers. We’re grateful for their time and efforts.

And for their willingness to answer the tough ones. To me, toughness peaked towards the end of the event, when they were asked the big “What If” question overlying all discussions of 802.11n today: What if the final 802.11n standard differs so much from the current interim standard that you find you have to change hardware?

You could hear a pin drop at that moment. Or at least, I could. Their answers were great, but I don’t have space to report it, so you’re going to have to listen to the recording to hear them.