Aruba Brings Wired/Wi-Fi Management Together

Aruba says its customers were complaining about too much finger-pointing going on between the stakeholders responsible for maintaining separate Ethernet- and Wi-Fi-based networks. With a new add-on for AirWave 7, the company says it's beginning to work toward a solution to all the problems posed by blending the two network types.

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Historically, wireless LAN management systems have been isolated from their wired counterparts, relying upon loose integration techniques like trap forwarding and console cut-through. Wireless-to-wired event correlation and trouble resolution are often labor-intensive, politically sensitive processes, plagued by inefficiencies and finger-pointing.

But as WLANs become an essential part of enterprise networks, this approach no longer suffices. "If a problem interferes with one of our mission-critical applications, our users don't care whether the cause is the device's firmware, the wireless AP's signal or a down switch - they just want it fixed," said Greg Catalano, Senior Network Engineer at Boise, Inc.

To bring wired and wireless management together under one unified umbrella, Aruba Networks today announced a major expansion to AirWave 7, a heretofore heterogeneous WLAN management system. "We wanted to stop the bickering that so many of our customers say they experience," said Bryan Wargo, General Manager of Aruba's AirWave division.

"Our customers told us they really needed a unified view of switches, controllers, APs, and mobile devices, along with one push configuration for changes that span all of those devices. So we created AirWave 7 to make the world a better place 'for network administrators and users' by offering a central source of consolidated information."

Read "Latest AirWave Unifies Wireless, Wired and Mobile Control" at Wi-Fi Planet