Aruba, AirWave Team To Offer WLAN Management Tools

Aruba Networks and AirWave Wireless have teamed up to provide enterprises with an integrated solution to migrate their legacy wireless local area networks to a more up-to-date centralized architecture.

AirWave's Wireless Management Suite will now support Aruba's extensive line of wireless access points (APs), allowing companies to manage a mixed network of older, stand-alone APs and newer, "thin" APs from a centralized console. The software provides visibility into both generations of hardware, thus allowing companies to transition easily to the newer, more efficient network architecture without having to maintain parallel networks.

"The first-generation WLANs installed by early adopters were built around a distributed architecture of thick APs, and more than five million thick APs have been deployed. However, these networks are less secure and scalable, and are more complex and costly to manage than Aruba's centralized WLANs," Aruba senior director of product marketing Gary Singh said in a statement. "These forward- thinking organizations should not be stuck with old technology or burdened with excessive operating and management costs. AirWave's monitoring and compliance management capabilities will help our customers maintain control over their entire wireless infrastructure, reduce operating costs and enable a smooth transition to a centralized WLAN architecture."

Installed on a server in a company's network operations center, the AirWave Management Platform provides detailed real-time and historical information on each user connected to the WLAN. Using radio-frequency (RF) data collected by the Aruba APs and controllers, the suite can plot AP and user locations and generate accurate RF heatmaps.