Enterasys Networks yesterday announced extensions and new products under the umbrella of OneFabric Edge that augment their OneFabric architecture, announced a few months ago. There's quite a bit here - wireless LANs, a new line (the K-Series) of switches, and, most importantly, unified wired/wireless management. The benefits of the unified approach are many - lower costs, improved operations productivity, fewer opportunities for errors and configuration-related problems, and - really the bottom line in any IT organization - improved reliability, uptime, and end-user productivity.
I spent some time with Ram Appalaraju, VP of Marketing at Enterasys, and his team just before the OneFabric announcement last year, and I was impressed with the completeness of both the vision and the product line. I was thus motivated to produce our latest White Paper on the general topic of a blueprint for IT in an era of BYOD, virtualization, and an ever-greater dependence on the LAN, both wired and especially wireless. It's hard to argue with where Enterasys is going here, and I'm looking forward to hearing more from users about the benefits of this strategy during the coming year.
Mathias is a principal at Farpoint Group, a wireless advisory firm in Ashland, Mass.