Aerohive Makes Fat Wireless Phat

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

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

At the sametime, traffic forwarding is arguably more efficient with autonomous accesspoints, as traffic isn't traversing giant aggregated links back to expensive controllerappliances. But Aruba, Cisco, Meru and others convinced the market that "thinis in," and most large wireless networks today are built on lightweight APs that rely oncontrollers for configuration and traffic aggregation back into the wirednetwork within each vendor's version of Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE)-like tunnels that contain wirelessVLANs and control signaling. 

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

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

Could the Aerohive model portend the future of theWLAN market? It may be too early to tell just how disruptive thiscontroller-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 iswidely respected as a WLAN industry expert. That he is with Aerohive isinteresting in itself, and his explanation of the hive architecture is prettyfascinating, whether or not you completely agree with the philosophy behind it.  

Hives are groups of access points that useCooperative Control (Aerohive-speak for a collection of protocols that form thebulk of the solution's magic) to share a control plane while keeping trafficforwarding at the AP. Hives can be quite large, and a single hive can actuallybe 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 todecide optimal traffic paths as part of what Akin describes as "responsiblelocal forwarding."

Aerohive claims feature parity with the big guys, from QoSto security to spectrum management, all without the controller layerrequired. As the admin of a largecontroller-based network, I hope that Aerohive's approach takes root and spreads to othervendors. I'd gladly support big-boned access points again if they could deliverthe contemporary WLAN experience without that layer of controller fat in themiddle.