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Aerohive Makes Fat Wireless Phat

When you do the marketing math, Aeorhive's case is easily
made. Big WLAN vendors are having a field day making whopping throughput claims
to hawk their latest 802.11n hardware, and the prevailing undercurrent through
all IT media centers on the explosion of mobile and portable devices that are
becoming mainstream computing devices. Take all those devices, using all of that
bandwidth, and you have to wonder if sending it all to the network core is the
best strategy. Aerohive says the wireless controller model should be yesterday's
news in an 802.11n world, and that its smart, fat access points are the
better way of doing wireless, by eliminating potential controller bottlenecks.

Back in the day, all wireless access points were "fat." They
each configured separately, which was a double-edged sword. Managing large
numbers of independently thinking access points can be challenging, and
features like fast secure roaming are iffy on large legacy WLANs.

At the same
time, traffic forwarding is arguably more efficient with autonomous access
points, as traffic isn't traversing giant aggregated links back to expensive controller
appliances. But Aruba, Cisco, Meru and others convinced the market that "thin
is in," and most large wireless networks today are built on lightweight APs that rely on
controllers for configuration and traffic aggregation back into the wired
network within each vendor's version of Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE)-like tunnels that contain wireless
VLANs and control signaling. 

It is nice
to configure a controller that, in turn, configures hundreds of access points,
and advanced features like automated channel and power settings are
standard in controllers. But controllers can be extremely costly single points
of failure, and their occasional buggyness can create tremendous
administrative burdens when things go wrong.

Enter Aerohive. This minor player in the WLAN market is
growing and garnering all sorts of recognition among analysts, who love to use
terms like "cool," "innovative" and "hot" when describing the company and
product set. In a nutshell, Aerohive combines the good of legacy autonomous
access points with the benefits of central management and coordinated control,
to create a solution that eliminates controllers while still competing with
controller-based solutions.

Could the Aerohive model portend the future of the
WLAN market? It may be too early to tell just how disruptive this
controller-less model will prove to be, but Aerohive's Devin Akin (of Certified Wireless Network Professional fame)
tells a good story about why he believes in his company's architecture.

Akin has been in the wireless game a long time and is
widely respected as a WLAN industry expert. That he is with Aerohive is
interesting in itself, and his explanation of the hive architecture is pretty
fascinating, whether or not you completely agree with the philosophy behind it.  

Hives are groups of access points that use
Cooperative Control (Aerohive-speak for a collection of protocols that form the
bulk of the solution's magic) to share a control plane while keeping traffic
forwarding at the AP. Hives can be quite large, and a single hive can actually
be a complete large WLAN if you choose. With no controller, failover is simplified when trouble hits an AP.
Aerohive's home-grown and extremely resource-beefy APs use Open Shortest Path First (OSPF)-like aspects to
decide optimal traffic paths as part of what Akin describes as "responsible
local forwarding."

Aerohive claims feature parity with the big guys, from QoS
to security to spectrum management, all without the controller layer
required. As the admin of a large
controller-based network, I hope that Aerohive's approach takes root and spreads to other
vendors. I'd gladly support big-boned access points again if they could deliver
the contemporary WLAN experience without that layer of controller fat in the
middle.