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Craig Mathias

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Key Theme for 2010: Unified Networking

Aruba's AirWave 7 adds wired to wireless

By Craig Mathias on Tue, 01/12/10 - 9:15pm.

. What's this?

I've written about unified networking many times over the past few years, the idea here being that the seemingly natural division between wired and wireless LANs isn't quite so natural, and that a key to lowering costs, particularly operational but also capital, is in thinking unified across all portions of the network value chain: planning, deployment, and particularly operations.

And as the focus of operations is in management systems, Aruba's announcement of AirWave 7 yesterday is right on target. AirWave as a platform has been promoted and used for some time as a multi-vendor WLAN management system, offering simplified operations (particularly with respect to monitoring and reporting) across the product lines of a variety of vendors. This can be useful in a large range of situations, from the management of legacy and transitional environments to the inevitable requirement for multi-vendor operations resulting from a merger or acquisition. AirWave has now extended that concept, quite naturally, to wired network elements. After all, wireless just adds a few more considerations (like RF issues and essential client mobility) to all of the other requirements of LAN-based networking - security, traffic management, monitoring and reporting, troubleshooting, fault recovery, and on and on. Why not, then, use a single platform for the LAN - wired, wireless, or both?

AirWave also added a whole bunch of other interesting features, including mobile device management, another key direction for 2010 all by itself, additional XML-based extensibility, and my personal favorite, customizable user interfaces and dashboards. This is important because each installation, and sometimes even individual staff members within a given installation, can improve productivity by normalizing the user interface to their experience or preference. As I've worked on a number of network management products in the past, I've always marveled at how product designers agonize over the layout of specific screens. But such agonizing is usually futile, as it's impossible to determine exactly what a given user will want to see in any given case - and even these requirements can change over time. Let's end the frustration on both sides. User interfaces, again as I've said before, should not really be part of the application - they should be customizable to whatever a user wants. Hey, if one can skin an MP3 player, why not a unified network management system?

Unified networking is one of the key themes for 2010. I'm working on a longer document on this topic that I hope to have for you around the end of this month. In the meantime, though, it's best to keep an eye on progress in unified operational and management strategies and systems. Your bottom line could depend upon it.