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Controller-based WLANs turned inside out

Cooperative AP architecture creates simpler, cheaper wireless LAN, company says

By John Cox , Network World , 05/08/2007

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Aerohive Networks wants you to step forward into the future of wireless LANS . . . by stepping backward.

The venture-funded start-up this week launched its HiveAP product line, which turns the dominant wireless-controller architecture of most enterprise WLANs inside out.

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PROFILE: AEROHIVE NETWORKS
Location:	Santa Clara, Calif.
Founded:	March 2006
Primary business:	Wireless LAN access points
CEO:	David Flynn, who also is president; formerly vice president of marketing at NetScreen Technologies, a network security appliance start-up bought by Juniper for $4 billion.
Co-founders:	CTO Changming Liu, former distinguished engineer at Juniper; and Gavin Zhu, general manager of China operations, who previously co-founded Blootech, a wireless personal area networking start-up.
Financing:	$6 million from Northern Light Venture Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, whose partners come from NetScreen and Juniper.
Customers and competitors:	First announced customer is First Industrial Realty Trust, Chicago, an industrial real estate firm. Aerohive says it has beta testing under way with 10 other companies. Rivals include Cisco, Aruba Networks, Trapeze Networks and others that sell Wi-Fi access points.
Fast fact:	Thirty of the company's 50 employees are engineers based in China.

Click to see: Aerohive profile

Controllers, sometimes called wireless LAN switches, emerged only five years ago as a way to centralize wireless LAN security, radio frequency management, administration, security and roaming, and translating being 802.11 wireless and 802.3 Ethernet nets, for collections of stripped-down, or “thin,” access points. Each access point tunnels back to the controller over the wired net, sending to it all data and control packets. Before the advent of the controller, many of these functions either didn’t exist in early WLANs or were handled by autonomous, or “fat” access points.

Aerohive executives say their approach preserves the new functions created by the controller, but distributes them through a meshed network of intelligent access points, each with its own IP address. These devices cooperatively work together, accomplishing the tasks previously done by a separate controller. By eliminating the controller, Aerohive creates a WLAN that is dramatically cheaper to buy and install, especially for large, multisite branch offices or retail-store deployments.